The Black
by saintjimmy84
Summary: Sometimes to heal a broken soul all you need is a bit of Space. Four years after the war, Harry Potter seeks an ending by throwing himself through the veil. Instead, he finds a beginning.
1. Introduction

**_Disclaimer_** - _I do not own Harry Potter or the works of Joss Whedon. But you can't take the sky from me, and if I dare to dream a bit and share it with all of you, then I only hope that J.K. and Joss can forgive me for it._

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><p><strong><em>Prologue: The Death of Harry Potter<em>**

_oo00oo_

_Since time began,  
>the dead alone know peace.<br>Life is but melting snow._

Final poem - Nandai (1786-1817)

_oo00oo_

The final piece of Harry James Potter died on the fourteenth of August in 2001. It died silently, in the way these things tend to, without fanfare or dramatics. There were no tears and no rage, no exchange of fists or of spells or unkind words. When the last bit of him died there was hardly a blink to indicate it happened, and if anybody at the time noticed then they certainly didn't give any indication of it. Harry, for his part, deceived everybody perfectly that day; none of the people who saw him on the street, in the office or outside of his home suspected that any part of him was dead, let alone the final part. When he smiled there was no hint that behind his bright green eyes he had been reduced to a corpse, and when he kissed his lover Ginny goodbye and idly whispered to her that she tasted like strawberries (and she that he still tasted like mint and tea) she had no way of knowing that he was empty, that on the inside he was bones and dust and a gaping maw, and that he never planned to taste strawberries again. He had become a very good liar. After all, that's what heroes do; they lie. Or at least that's how Harry always felt about the matter.

But you and I know that he was dead inside. And so it should come as no surprise to us that he threw himself through the veil that evening. It came as a surprise to the rest of the world, though, and especially to Ginny, who hadn't realized yet that she would never taste mint again, that tea would never make her happy again, and that she would never be able to explain to others just why this was so. When she first got the news she denied it, and then she fought it, and then she locked herself in her (Harry's) room and screamed and cried and mourned and didn't emerge for days, because Harry was more than just her lover and her friend. He was a hero to her, to the whole world, and that's all she had ever asked him to be; his normal, wonderful, charming, heroic self.

Ron mourned in his own stoic way. There were a few tears and a great deal of firewhiskey and a brawl that got him kicked out of the Leaky Cauldron for good. And when he and Hermione ended their relationship two years later he honestly believed that it was his fault.

When Hermione heard the news her knees gave out from under her and she collapsed into the lounge chair in the flat she shared with Ron. She cried, too. But mostly she felt numb, because she couldn't understand why Harry would do such a thing. Years later, after she had become somewhat of a hero in her own right, she was filing away a report in her office on a case that had brought her a small measure of fame from the press. She had profiled, tracked, and arrested the man herself, if he could be called a man; he was a particularly twisted, murderous wizard responsible for the deaths of fifteen muggle children, and the first time she had stepped into a crime scene that was his handiwork she retched for what felt to her like hours. So did most of the other officers present that day, even though none of them were strangers to murder.

The press, of course, reported what was most convenient for it. Everybody praised her that day. But nobody listened, nobody understood, and nobody tried to. She sat down at her desk, cluttered with papers, empty of decoration except for a single framed picture of her, Ron, and Harry when they were still students, and then the flash of insight hit her and, with it, the rest of the tears she'd never been able to cry. She wept for the better part of the day over the things she had lost and the ways in which she had failed. Her aurors had never seen her so distraught, and nobody ever spoke of the incident again.

When Nevile Longbottom heard the news he spent half the evening drinking a 300 year old bottle of scotch. He then apparated to Little Hangleton (having visited it once before with Harry) and pissed on the grave of Tom Marvolo Riddle. Afterwards he waited around for another hour and then pissed on the grave of Tom Sr., just for good measure.

Draco Malfoy preferred brandy. But he drank too, when he heard that Harry Potter had died. It wasn't a victory toast. The years since the fall of Voldemort had granted him some semblance of wisdom and he recognized Harry for what he was; his better. So Draco Malfoy set aside his appointments for the evening and sat in his study, drinking to another fallen soldier.

Luna Lovegood heard the news over the Wizarding Wireless when she was in Norway. She politely excused herself from the company of Rolf Scamander, who had been vying for her affections for several weeks as they cataloged the breeding patterns of Crumple Horned Snorkacks for the newest edition of _Fantastic Creatures and Where to Find Them_. She travelled to Trondheim and purchased a portkey to the ministry in London. On arriving, she promptly snuck into to the Department of Mysteries, performed a fantastically complicated charm to unlock the door to the execution chamber, and hurled herself through the veil after him.

Which is why we shouldn't be surprised to find out that there was something on the other side.

_oo00oo_

**_Author's Notes_**

Hello to all of you, and welcome to my first proper effort to write a fanfiction. The prologue that you just read was written after I'd spent the better part of an evening nursing a strong bottle of red wine while watching _Firefly_. The rest of the story started clicking into place the next morning, when I read over my drunken composition and realized that I might be on to something.

To stave off some of the inevitable questions, I should mention now that Luna, though she has followed Harry, will not show up in the story until at least after the first arc. The verse is a large place and the inner workings of the veil are unknown. Who knows where she'll end up?


	2. Winter: Prologue

_**Disclaimer**__ - I do not own Firefly or Harry Potter. Rights for those go to Joss Whedon and J.K. Rowling, respectively. I'm like a five-year old, building my own small castles in the sandbox they've made for us. Hope you appreciate._

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><p><em><strong>Episode One: The Endless Winter<br>Prologue: Shelter from the Storm**_

_oo00oo_

_The untold want, by life and land never granted,_  
><em> Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.<em>

"The Untold Want" - Walt Whitman

_oo00oo_

"_Now that the war's over, our soldiers get to come home, yes?" A boy asked._

_River's breath hitched and her hold on the wooden stylus in her hand faltered. It clattered to the tabletop in front of her, stretching across the grain of the desk. Under the crimson light of the translucent awnings surrounding the classroom it lay there like an omen._

_Not this. Not this again._

_She felt a void well up inside her stomach, a black hole carving a hollow in her chest. It tugged at her heart. None of the other children noticed her mistake or the look of pain that flashed briefly across her features. They never did. She snatched the stylus from the desktop and tucked it between her leg and the seat, as if hiding it there would somehow change the things that were about to happen. It never had before, but still she hoped._

"_Some of them. Some will be stationed on the rim planets as Peace Enforcers." The teacher responded. She had kind eyes—the worst kind, really._

"_I don't understand. Why were the independents even fighting us?" Another boy asked. River didn't bother to pay attention to him. Nameless, faceless, second row back and three from the left; a non-entity. Just another fragment. She felt a sliver of her lucidity slip away from her, drifting like a leaf on the current of her dream._

"_That's a good question. Does anybody want to open on that?" The teacher smiled, smoothing out a few of the wrinkles in her sari. The teacher's gaze drifted over the classroom and lingered on River for a brief moment. She shuddered._

"_I hear they're cannibals." One of the girls nearby stated._

"_Nah. That's only the reavers!"_

"_Reavers aren't real!" The girl snapped back. If only she knew. _

_One of the other boys seemed to know better, and chipped in his own two cents. _"_Full well they are! They attack settlers from space. They kill them and wear their skins and rape them for hours and hours, and…"_

"Chénmò, bù qiàdàng de háizi!_"* The teacher snapped. For a moment River entertained the idea that some of the teacher's true nature leaked out when she admonished the boy, but she knew she was lying to herself. This was a dream-the teacher and students nothing but the glittering fragments of a long-broken memory. In the end, the only thing stabbing the thin, wooden stylus into her forehead was her own mind. A thousand wooden splinters, driven into her brain, by her brain. The perfect way to describe her own brand of brokenness. Up in front of the classroom, the teacher stared down the boy until he looked repentant enough for her standards, then continued her lecture.._

"_It's true that there are dangers on the outer planets. So let's follow up on Borodin's question." The Borodin-fragment (second row back and three from the left) preened himself at the attention like some exotic bird. Borodin. Bird. Not a fragment; just a feather.. Another sliver of her clarity slipped from her grasp and the edges of her dream began to blur and mix with the red hue from the awnings above. The teacher continued without paying attention to Borodin, or River. "With all the social and medical advancements that we can bring to the independents, why would they fight so hard against us?"_

_And there it was. Her cue. A hundred times she had been in this moment. A hundred times she had fought against the urge to speak, knowing the words that would leave her mouth, knowing that it only ended in pain, that the wooden stylus tucked between her leg and the seat would somehow wind up in the teacher's hands, and she would suffer the sharp pain behind her eyes as the teacher drove the stylus between them like a knife._

_We meddle. On the inside, River cried; she didn't want this to happen again. On the inside, she set her jaw and bent all her will towards changing the damned dream, fighting back the words even as her lips opened and started to form them. For the hundredth time, she began to despair._

_"We med…"_

"_It's about freedom." A voice came from behind her. River's twisted in her seat, her hair whipping around and flying across her face. There was a boy there. A **boy**, not a fragment. And suddenly the haze closing in on her popped like a soap bubble and she was back in the moment, everything crystal clear. He had wild black hair, the kind that battled valiantly against combs, and wore a pair of thick-rimmed glasses that did nothing to obscure his vivid green eyes. His stylus sat on the desk in front of him as well, but looked wrong. It wasn't the pale tan bamboo the rest of the class used for their displays, but darker, and longer as well. River's mind absently ran a few calculations. Eleven inches, give or take a half._

"_What do you mean?" the teacher asked._

"_You act as if the Alliance is being generous. But every gift you give them comes with a cost. Every advance you share comes at the price of more of their liberty." The boy said. The teacher smiled her kind (the worst kind of) smile and rose from her chair, walking past the class, past River, towards the boy as he continued. "That's not generosity. You're treating them like whores, giving them a coin and expecting them to bend over and take whatever you thrust at them. Why wouldn't they fight that?"_

_From the mouths of babes. River had never heard a stronger indictment against the Alliance._

"_Harry, you misunderstand." Said the teacher. "We're not trying to force anything on them. We're trying to help them become better."_

"_Say what you want. I know more than my share about the costs." He responded. He'd crossed his arms in front of his chest and didn't seem to notice that his (stylus?) was now in the teacher's hands. River realized a second too late what was about to happen and tried to yell, tried to say something, anything, but just as surely as the words spilled from her mouth in every other dream, in this one they refused to budge._

"_Everything we're doing is to make a better world, Harry. We're doing it for the greater good." The teacher smiled and leveled the stylus at the boy's forehead, but didn't move to stab him. Instead she started speaking again._

"_**Avada Kedavra**__"_

_River's world exploded in a shower pain and a flash of sickly, green light._

_oo00oo_

River sat bolt upright in her bed. She heard a disembodied scream coming from the corner of her bunk, tearing through the silence on the wings of her nightmare. It took her a moment to realize that the scream was real, and another to realize that it was her own. Cold beads of sweat ran down her face, her back, her legs. She shivered and clutched at her hair, trying to regain some semblance of control over herself. After a moment tears joined the sweat and she ground her teeth, trying to bite back the sob welling up in her throat.

Something had changed. She could feel it.

_Serenity_ fit her like a well-worn dress. In the years since she and Simon had first boarded she found some measure of peace in the ship, in the haphazard steel framework, the soft burn of the engines, the endless black sea surrounding her. In the silence.

She loved _Serenity_ for the silence it brought her. The only voices she heard here were the ones that mattered, or the ones she brought with her. But now the soft hum of steel and fire and family was joined by a new sound, a sort of keening screech, like the sound of metal scraping across metal. It was soft but she could hear it slowly building. She had heard it before, in the months leading up to _(Miranda)_ the incident. She'd hoped it was all over. Maybe it was. But the sound was back anyway. Nothing good ever came of that sound.

She took a deep breath and opened her mind to _Serenity_. The thoughts of _(her family)_ the crew slowly started to drift up to her. She could feel Jayne in the room next to her, his thoughts lumbering along slowly like an ox, his ears so occupied with the sound of his own snores that he hadn't heard her. Good.

Another bubble of feeling drifted to her from the engine room. Kaylee. It was warm and sounded like strawberries and tasted like the warm hum of a plasma drive and was full of nothing but soft contentment.

Most of the others were asleep. She hadn't roused them, but she could feel Wash _(dinosaurs! Grr! Argh!)_ watching the bridge, and with him, leaving the bridge, coming through the crew quarters towards her room, was...

_Tap. Tap. Tap._ The sound of soft knocking came from the hatch to her room. She crawled out of her bunk and placed her ear against it.

_Tap. Tap. Tap._

She could feel him on the other side. Faith and iron and old parchment. She opened the hatch and peeked through at the Shepherd on the other side.

"I heard you screaming." Book said. It was all he needed to say. She moved back to her bunk, making space for him. He settled himself in the entryway.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

River hugged herself, rubbing her shoulders. She tried to figure out what to tell him but the words were _(feathers)_ fleeting and scattered.

"Dreams. Thoughts. Sometimes I can't…" suddenly the wall was very interesting.

Book sat in the entryway, arms resting on his knees. She could feel him watching her intently, gauging her. He saw more than the others did, sometimes. She wondered what he was thinking, but for some reason none of his thoughts floated over to her.

"I understand," he told her. Again, all he needed to say, even if he was wrong. Silence lingered between the two for a moment as he tried to assemble his thoughts.

"Some things… stay with you." He said. "Can't say that my dreams are the same as yours, or that I can really understand what's happened to you or how you're feeling, but…" he looked at the corner of the room, where the wall met the ceiling. God. He was looking for God. But after a moment he just glanced back at his own hands.

"Well, we all carry our own scars." He finished. Maybe he did understand, if not her own feelings, then something like them.

"Not scars." She said. "Scabs." Book glanced up from his hands to look at her. He had that look in his eye, inquiring and expect ant and polite, and honest. The look he gave people who were about to confess something. So she confessed. "Scabs. Like blood, crusted on top. But inside it still festers. Poison, still growing."

She watched as he took her words in and mulled on them, trying to figure out if she was talking about him or everyone or just herself. She didn't know which, either. Another moment passed before she realized that he was just content to let her talk, and didn't feel the need to impose any advice on her. "How's your heart, Shepherd? How's your legs?" she asked him.

His lips turned upwards at the corners, just slightly. "Still beatin'. Still movin'. Your brother says they'll heal." He answered, then looked at his legs as if reconsidering. "Mostly, anyhow," he added, and then after another brief moment, "I never did get the chance to thank you proper. For Haven, that is. For what you did there."

And now it was his turn to wait again. She smiled softly, too, an almost mirror image of his own. She liked this game, the way the silences and the words bounced back and forth between them. She took a moment to collect her own thoughts, scattered as they were.

"Faith." She finally said.

"Mmm?"

"Faith." She repeated. "Mal, Zoe, Simon. They believe in you. Not God, but you. You remind them that…" and at that the words left her and all she could do was make a soft gesture. But she could see that he understood. "Couldn't let you die." She continued. "Would have left us empty inside. Just a void."

"Thank you."

He meant it. She nodded.

"How far along are we?" she asked, and Book shifted a bit in the doorway and then absently scratched his beard. He always did that when the subject shifted; one of those quirks that he probably didn't even know he had.

"Wash expects we got another day of burn before we get to St. Alban's. It'll probably be half that again, on account of Mal wanting to take it slow and keep fuel. Any idea of what's waitin' there for us? I was out when Mal had the meeting."

"Out" wasn't a strong enough word for it. The painkillers that Simon stocked were strong enough to knock an ox out for five hours, or Jayne for three. Book never stood a chance. River answered as best as she could.

"Sanctuary. No storm." She said. Silence lingered for a brief second before she broke it again, "Mal is a friend of St. Alban's." And then her thoughts drifted there. Friend of St. Alban's. Sanctuary. They could have peace, maybe, for a few days at least.

Book noticed as she started to drift and got up to leave. "Rest well, River." He said as he turned to exit the doorway.

"Shepherd. Wait." She said. He looked over his shoulder at her, the pale light of the crew corridor shining in behind him. His face was mostly shadow.

"Dreams have changed." She said. The shadow shifted slightly. His brows were creasing; he was trying to understand what she was telling him. If anyone would take the time to, it was him. Or perhaps Inara, but she wasn't here.

"Things are… moving? Like night, coming from behind. Pray for me?" She asked, and the shadow shifted again, this time in surprise.

"I thought you didn't…" He started.

"God can't hear it." She interrupted. This time his face stayed the same, but the muscles in his shoulders tensed ever so slightly. She flinched a bit inside. She'd learned some things about faith. Mostly about what it meant to him. She hadn't meant to…

"Don't know if he's listening." She amended. It was a compromise for her. God wasn't rational. Wasn't there. But maybe he listened anyway.

"I listen." She finally confessed. "You care for your flock. It's… peaceful." She felt him relax, felt him smile more than she saw him.

"I will." He told her, and he stepped into the hallway and closed the hatch behind him. She smiled. Once more, it was all he needed to say.

_oo00oo_

_**Translation Notes**_

**Chénmò, bù qiàdàng de háizi!** – Roughly, "Silence, impertinent child!" (via Google Translate)

_oo00oo_

_**Author's Notes**_

_**4/28/2013**_ – It's been a long time since I originally posted this, but it feels much shorter. I've gone back and edited it a bit, cleaning up a few words here and there, as well as reformatting some of the text so that it matches other chapters, and adding the lines to Walt Whitman's "The Untold Want" as an introduction.

For those of you who are wondering, in this fiction I have ret-conned the events of the Big Damn Movie such that both Book and Wash survived, though barely. This reflects a preference of mine; they're my favorite characters and playing around in the Firefly universe wouldn't feel the same to me without them. One reviewer brought up that exploring the crew's reaction to their deaths would make for a wonderful story, and that's true. But I'll leave that story for another time or another author.

In the meantime, I'm curious as to what you, the reader, think of my characterizations of River and Book, or what you think of the story in general. If you have opinions to offer, or just a kind word to pass along, you can submit it as a review below. Best wishes to you.

SJ84


	3. Winter I

_**Disclaimer: **I do not own Harry Potter. I do not own Firefly. I should probably add that I don't own Lynrd Skynrd, either. But I do own my brain, and I've got this weird story that's been playing around in it for a while now. Thought I'd share it with all of you in the hopes that we could pay tribute to Joss and J.K. by continuing to have fun with the worlds they've created. Sound good?  
><em>

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><p><em><strong>Episode One: The Endless Winter<br>Chapter I: Soldiers Like Us**_

_oo00oo_

_Do you know what a soldier is, young man?_  
><em>He's the chap who makes it possible<em>  
><em>for civilized folks to despise war.<em>

Allan Massie

_oo00oo_

Jayne Cobb was a simple man. Born the first son of Radiant Mansfield, he spent the first fifteen years of his life in the mid-latitudes of Aberdeen, rarely straying more than a hundred miles from his hometown. Summers were hot and brutal. Winters were equally unkind. He started working young to support his family and learned soon enough the things he needed to do to handle both, and handle them well.

Jayne's father was a no-good _fèi xuè_ who racked up a dungheap full of gambling debt and skipped town to avoid the law. So was his stepfather, for that matter, Except his stepfather didn't have the decency to leave. Jane smiled wryly at the thought as he field-stripped the gun in front of him, an Oxford Model III N/G Pistol that he had taken to calling 'Lucy" some years back. She was his second favorite gun.

As the debts piled higher Eamon Cobb turned to the bottle and started coming home later and angrier. It wasn't long before Radiant Mansfield-Cobb became the focus of his ire, and the beatings followed shortly after. She took them and stayed silent about it. She once told Jayne that she didn't want to make the problem worse. She didn't want Eamon's attention to drift to her sons, she said. She took it for two years, becoming less and less like her namesake with each passing day, with each new bruise.

Two years after the beatings started, Jayne ended them. Lucy had been there with him, and was with him when he left the planet three days later, taking the surname Cobb to remind himself where he came from and why he wouldn't go back. With Jayne gone, the law didn't inquire much further into the matter. Turns out nobody missed Eamon Cobb.

Jayne took a few moments to oil Lucy's barrel and care for her trigger assembly, then started putting her back together.

Before Jayne took to the black, before he was a mercenary, Jayne had worked the oil fields of Aberdeen, and knew more than his share about how to handle the cold. St. Alban's, though, was something new to him. It was a bitterly cold planet, worse than Aberdeen by half, and that was in the summer. He didn't want to think too hard about what it would be like to live there, and was glad Mal had no intention of staying past the time they'd need to get _Serenity_ spaceworthy again. Mal expected him to stay with the ship and keep a ready eye in case things started to turn sour. He set Lucy off to the side and picked up Lux, a small derringer he'd picked up on a border planet two years back, and began to strip her down as well. Like all of his guns, Lux had her own story, but Jayne didn't bother thinking about it too much; he had things to prepare for before they touched down on St. Alban's.

Jayne Cobb knew where he came from, and why he was here. And that simple thought was enough to keep him working.

_oo00oo_

Mal and Zoe were otherwise occupied in the dining room.

"I don't like this, sir," Zoe said. She wasn't fond of calling her captain out when others were around, but the kitchen was empty at the moment and she felt more at ease voicing her concerns. "We're going to be grounded."

She didn't need to say much more to get her point across to Mal. Being on the ground was one thing; being grounded, without the fuel to break atmo or the supplies to make the next planet, was the kind of situation any decent captain avoided like the plague. Mal silently cursed Badger and the trouble he'd heaped on them. At the very least, though, this time they'd taught him that he couldn't keep betraying them without penalty. Mal figured they'd wind up working with him again. Someday. If they had nowhere else to go, which happened more often than he'd prefer it to. A healthy dose of fear on Badger's part would make things run more smoothly all around.

"I don't care much for it neither, Zoe," he replied. "But it's done and there ain't much we can do to change things now, specially seein' as we didn't have much of a say in the matter to begin with." Zoe took this with her usual stoicism; she knew St. Alban's was the only option available to them. She couldn't be second-guessing him because, as Mal saw it, there was no second to do any guessing about.

"I understand, sir." She said. And she did understand. "But I still don't like it. Promise me we'll be off of this rock as soon as we get her spaceworthy again."

"What's got you worryin' about this, Zoe?" He asked.

"We handed Tracey's body to 'em in a crate, sir." Zoe pulled out a blade and started cutting into the apple in front of her. It was one of the few good things they managed to take off of Persephone this time around, before they'd been chased off. Fruit was a rare luxury this far out in the verse. So were safe-havens.

"Not our fault." Mal said. "He made his choices, we made ours. Things went sour."

"Don't matter much to the family of a dead soldier, sir." She replied. "Can't see 'em havin' much goodwill left for us and ours. And you know Hill's going to want answers."

Mal treasured Zoe for a fair number of reasons, not least of which was that, if it came down to it, she was good enough to take him down with that little pig-sticker she was using to slice her apple. Of particular value to him, though, was that she was the kind of level headed person who could look at a situation and see all the possible ways the verse could use it to leave a man swinging from the gallows. Mal was a cynic, too, but often he lacked the foresight Zoe brought to the table. They formed a good pair, with her figuring out all the ways something couldn't happen and him figuring out how to make it happen anyway. She brought focus and logic. He brought the will to keep moving and the devil's own luck. More often than not, that was enough. There was a reason they were the only two of their platoon to walk away from Serenity Valley.

There was a metallic clicking sound and Wash's voice came over the comm-link. "Approaching St. Alban's, captain." It said. "ETA is less than five."

Mal turned back to Zoe. "I'll take care of Hill when we're on the ground." He told her. "I just need you to see to it that we find ourselves a means of getting' out of here with enough coin and fuel to make New Melbourne." He thought about that for a moment. "Doc oughta be good for some of that," he decided. "Kaylee, too."

"They're not going to appreciate the distraction." Zoe smiled.

"Ship comes first." He said, his voice a bit more clipped than it had been a moment before. Everyone on _Serenity_ knew Mal considered Kaylee in the same way he might consider a younger sister, or even a daughter. They also knew that didn't bode well for Simon's chances of ever getting in his good graces.

"They can get all googly-eyed over each other later." He finished.

"Eyes, sir?" Zoe teased. Mal grimaced.

"Or loins." Mal's grimace deepened. He looked like he'd just been asked to swallow something unpleasant. In a way, Zoe supposed he had. "Googly-loined." He said. With some effort he managed to shove aside most of his irritation at the thought of his mechanic getting sexed up by his ship's doctor. Most of it. "Don't much matter. They can do it later."

The comm clicked on again. "Hold on to your butts!" Wash announced. "We're about to hit atmo." There was a brief pause as the pilot on the other end of the comm considered something. "Zoe, get up here so you can hold on to mine for me." He said.

Zoe laughed and Mal just let his face slump forward into his palm. At least he wasn't thinking about Kaylee and her new stud anymore. "Remind me why you married him again?" Mal asked.

"He has a nice butt, sir." Zoe said, grabbing her apple and making her way towards the bridge.

"Ahh. Well..." Mal said, then paused for a second. "It's not nicer'n mine, is it?" He called out just as she was exiting the mess hall.

"_Qù tā mā de zìjǐ_, sir." Zoe said as she left.

_oo00oo_

St. Alban's was the type of backwater planet that most of the 'verse contented itself with leaving untouched. It was terraformed in 2290 but at the time the Alliance had its attention focused on two nearby planets which looked much more promising; Greenleaf and Anson's world. The bulk of the atmospheric recycling platforms that should have gone to St. Alban's were co-opted to make the other two planets habitable ahead of schedule, and as a result St. Alban's was left deficient in the greenhouse gases which would have made it a temperate planet. That, coupled with its distance from _Zhu Que_, the red sun, left it as a winter planet. There was a narrow temperate band around the equator where plants and civilization could grow properly, and the bulk of St. Alban's thirty million inhabitants lived there. Everything poleward of the two tropics was nothing but perpetual winter. Everything north of the arctic circle and south of the antarctic circle was completely uninhabitable.

It was a great irony, then, when Alliance science vessels discovered that St. Alban's was mineral rich and could have, if it had been terraformed properly the first time around, served as one of the most important mining and manufacturing hubs of the entire verse. Since the generation responsible for the failed terraforming had mostly passed, the Alliance didn't even have the luxury of assigning proper blame to somebody. They sought bids for mining the planet, but prior to the formation of the Corone Mining Consortium in 2499 no company had the technology, the manpower, or the inclination to brave the bitter cold for the resources that were likely to be there. Corone had plans for expansion into the planet, but they were slated for later in the century, when the Alliance was scheduled to return and complete the terraforming process.

In the meantime the stories of valuable minerals on the fringes of the planet were enough to coax a segment of the population out of the tropics and into the harsh winter. It was a gold rush all over again, enough so that the names Dorado and New Alaska had been assigned to the two continents in the southern hemisphere which served as the focal point of the prospecting efforts.

A prospector's life was harsh and lonely, but Mal understood the draw. A man who struck a decent vein of ore could, with the help of the planet's transport services, make a comfortable living for himself. A man who struck the right vein could bank on himself and his family being catapulted in to the ranks of nobility when the Consortium came through to mine it properly. As a rule of thumb Mal didn't care much for companies that large, but they did right by prospectors since it made good business sense for them. Often times buying out a prospector's claim was cheaper and more efficient than the efforts of prospecting on their own, so the Consortium considered it better to let the little man do the exploring and then offer him a fair price for his work if they paid off. Sometimes a fair price ran into the hundreds of millions of credits. The Consortium didn't mind since the return on a good vein could be a hundred times that.

In the meantime, the prospectors still needed community, so across the southern hemisphere small mining towns had popped up, serving as social and commercial hubs that the miners would either visit or base themselves out of. Portage was one of those towns, situated in a valley far enough away from the mountains of New Alaska that the frequent avalanches didn't pose a threat to it but close enough that most prospectors could afford to travel to and fro as they needed. The shipyard was small but ore freighters dropped by often enough, looking to stock up on the prospectors' findings and sell at a profit on nearby worlds such as Greenleaf.

Mal had no intention of docking in the shipyards. Too public. And if his conversation with Father Joseph was anything to go by, there had been a recent increase in Alliance activity over the area. Rumor was that they had a base somewhere out in the mountains and Mal didn't want to take the risk that checking into the docks would send up a red flag somewhere in one of their databases. There was a network of caves about twenty miles south of Portage which people of Mal's persuasion occasionally used to dock. The mountains there were kind enough that they weren't likely to get snowed in and private enough that they wouldn't draw notice. Father Joseph had agreed to meet them there.

_oo00oo_

"Cave!" River chirped.

"Hmm?" Simon was occupied with other things. He was one of the group traveling to Portage and he and Jayne had taken it upon themselves to unload a few crates of medical supplies. Simon already had a good idea of the sort of medical conditions he'd be working with here; frostbite, pneumonia, winter madness. The third wasn't in the range of things he'd been trained to deal with but he knew enough about it to know that the vials of Cortisol he had sequestered in the medical bay would be good for providing some temporary relief. With some luck he might be able to co-ordinate with some of the locals to set up a supply line to the St. Albans equatorial zone so they could get it in regularly. It was the best solution he had at hand. He was also acutely aware of the risks of opening such a supply line; Cortisol suppressed the immune system, and in a climate like this that could be dangerous for someone who came to rely on it too much. Absently he prayed that there was somebody among the fifteen hundred or so residents of Portage who he could trust to handle a possibility like that, or the help he provided here could very well wind up getting somebody killed.

"She shines her light." River informed him. "But she's hidden by the Earth."

Simon looked around them. The cave was massive, more than enough to hold _Serenity_ and possibly another two ships like her, but small enough that it took some tricky maneuvering on Wash's part to set her down properly. Wash's skills still amazed him. River was mesmerized by the sight of the light from the drive core as it washed over the cave walls. Simon knew her better than anybody aboard _Serenity_, or at least he thought he did. In too many ways, though, River was still a mystery to him. Simon's mind was all logic and focus, River's was intuitive and diffuse. It made communication between them difficult, sometimes. But she had grown peaceful over the last year, since Miranda, and they had been able to connect in a way he hadn't thought possible before now. It made him even more grateful for her.

"_Àirén?" _Simon felt Kaylee's arm slide around his waist. His heart started thundering in his chest. It took him more than a moment to bring it back down to a reasonable level. He looked down at the woman who'd become so important to him, so fast, and reached out to brush a stray hair out of her face. In a different world he never would have met her, and his life would have been all the cheaper for it.

"River's so much happier now." He told her.

"I know." Kaylee said, softly. Almost everything about her was soft and delicate; her voice, the feel of her arm around his waist. Everything except the calluses on her hands and the bright, almost violent force of her spirit.

Of course, that didn't mean that everything they got up to was soft and delicate. He'd tried that at first. It didn't work out so well. His jaw still occasionally clicked when he moved it the wrong way.

"Ever since Miranda it's like she's been made new. Ain't it?" She said.

"Well… yes." Simon said. He still didn't like the implications of that. He'd grown used to River depending on him. It was hard for him to let go.

"I think we all got made new since then, Simon."

She was right. Even Kaylee had changed. The horrors they saw on Miranda, the cataclysmic battle, the Alliance and the Operative and the Reavers .She'd aged on the inside, and Simon had noticed that she was more quiet and prone to introspection than she had been before. But even if her soul had grown a bit older it hadn't cheapened her. Somehow it made her sweeter, more complex, more layered. She'd seasoned like a fine strawberry wine. He still couldn't help but get drunk off of her presence.

"I know." He smiled. "Still, she's my sister."

"An' you're havin' trouble lettin' her be more than the little girl you saved so long ago. Sound right?" she asked. Simon had learned that she was surprisingly insightful, as well, at least as far as he was concerned. Maybe because she knew him about as well as one of her engines by now.

"…yeah." He said. It was about all he could say. Way to show of the good ol' IQ, Simon. Kaylee giggled and Simon just smiled wryly. He glanced at her again and then noticed that she was giving him a look. He was familiar with the look. Good things usually followed it. She was insatiable that way. Simon was fairly sure that if he wasn't as madly in love with her as she was with him, she might have frightened him off by now.

"Y'know," she said, idly running a finger up his chest, "I can reckon' up a couple things we might get up to. You know, purely so we can give your sister some… um… space." She smiled. He smiled. Absolutely insatiable. Simon leaned in and kissed her. He'd passed the stage where her kiss made him see fireworks, but not by much. After a moment a thought occurred to him. He pulled away slightly and glanced at River, who was busy twirling around in circles, dancing along with the light from the drive core as it played off the walls.

"Have you ever gotten the impression that River might, um, be able to hear us?" He asked.

Kaylee watched River for a second, too, then looked back at Simon and gave him a wicked smile. She gave him a shrug that suggested she didn't care much one way or the other.

"Look lively, now!" Mal exclaimed and Simon nearly jumped out of his skin. He had the decency to look ashamed for a second. Or at least he thought it was decency. Kaylee didn't seem to care much one way or the other. Mal sized the two up and concluded that he was glad that he interrupted whatever they were up to. "Father Joseph ought to be here soon," he informed them. "I just got done with him over the comm."

"So where we goin, then, cap'n?" Kaylee asked, removing her hands from Simon and smoothing out her shirt, which had somehow gotten ruffled.

"Skiff'll be takin' five of us to Portage. It's the main settlement in these parts. Wash, Jayne, an' River are stayin' with the ship."

"River's staying?" Simon asked. He was about to object for a moment before he realized that he no longer needed to; River could take care of herself just fine. That didn't mean he liked being away from her, though, although part of him was happy at the thought that she probably couldn't hear him and Kaylee from twenty miles away.

Across the cavern, under the glow of the lights, River smiled. She could. She didn't pay much attention as a courtesy to her brother, but she loved how awkward he managed to get over it.

"Not gonna be a problem with that, is there?" Mal asked. His posture suggested that he expected Simon to give a very specific answer to that question. Simon shook his head.

"I need you two there with me." Mal continued. "You're the only ones on this boat got skills we can trade for coin. We need you to scrounge up what you can by way of food, fuel, parts. Whatever you can get." A gust of cold wind blew in through the opening of the cave, briefly overpowering the heat from the engines, and Mal adjusted his coat to brace himself against the sudden drop in temperature. "People out here are miners," he told them. "Simple folk. Might not take too kindly to your sister if she goes all hazy on us."

"She hasn't had an episode in over six months." Simon drawled.

"Doesn't need to." Mal stated. "And I didn't say she would, now did I?"

Mal was right about that. River had different flavors of crazy; there was a distinct difference between dancy twirly River and choppy stabby River. She hadn't crossed over into the second for a long while but she pretty much pitched her tent in the first.

"We're walkin' a tight line here already and I don't want to make waves." Mal continued. "On, off, with enough fuel and stock to make New Melbourne. _Dǒng ma?"_

Simon and Kaylee both nodded. The cave was suddenly overpowered by the rattling sound of a poorly maintained engine as a miner's skiff pulled into the cavern's entrance. Kaylee cringed; rattling machinery was a sin to her and Simon was willing to place credits on her tearing it open and fixing it as soon as she could the next morning.

Jayne stopped next to them with another crate of supplies out of _Serenity's_ cargo bay as the mining skiff's hatch opened and a man emerged. Father Joseph W. Hill was a heavyset, middle aged man with wisps of thin red hair poking out from under his cap. He had a grim look about him as Mal approached, though Simon couldn't tell if that was because of their arrival on the planet or if it was just the natural state of his face.

"Don't look happy to see us." Jayne opined.

"I guess not." Simon agreed as Mal shook the man's hand. He grabbed the handles of the dolly he was using and started rolling his crate over to the back of the skiff.

"Father Joseph," Mal said, shaking the man's hand. "You've done us a kindness."

Hill smiled but it didn't reach his eyes. Simon got the sense that something was amiss. "You're a friend to us, Mal." Hill reassured Mal. "And you were a friend to Tracey as well. We're happy to harbor you for a while."

Simon was now certain that Mal was going to have some explaining to do. From the looks of it, Mal had caught on as well. In spite of that, neither of them sensed any hostility from Hill, but the young man in the pilot's seat of the skiff was another story altogether.

"That there's Harmon Smith." Hill said when he noticed Mal looking over at the driver. "Younger brother to Tracy. His family took it hard."

"I 'spect they did." Mal said. "So did we."

It took a moment before Hill finally decided to break the tension. "Our conversation over the cortex a week ago led me to believe you might be of some help to us, as well." He said. "Is that right?" He sized up Simon, obviously the doctor of the crew, and his attention moved on to Kaylee, likely wondering who she was and what she was doing there.

Mal smiled and put on his showboatin' voice. "Indeedy!" he exclaimed. "This here is Simon, crew medic and the best damn doctor this side of the verse." Simon shook Hill's hand and exchanged pleasantries with the man. Mal gestured to Kaylee. "And I believe you've met Kaylee already."

And then Father Joseph smiled. A real smile. It happened slowly, like the shifting of the earth, but he smiled, and Kaylee grinned right back at him. How she had that effect on people, Simon had no idea.

"I have. We've spoken over the cortex, too." He said to Mal. Then he approached Kaylee and shook her hand. "You know," he told her, "I can think of four mechanics right off the top of my head who'd give up a kidney to meet you."

Kaylee beamed.

"I don't think I've ever seen Prentiss happier than when you told him how to rig up a plasma jack out of a skiff stabilizer and a compression coil. Damn near blew up his shop tryin' to get it to work." He said. Kaylee primped a little under the praise, teasing him for his generosity.

"Well shucks, then," she said. "I 'spect it just wouldn't be polite of me now to hide all by my lonesome out here on my ship, then, now would it?"

"No, ma'am." Hill said, offering her his arm. She took it happily and walked with him towards the skiff.

"It's _my_ boat." Mal grumped.

"Aww. C'mon, captain. Don't get your johns all in a bunch over it." Kaylee quipped. Simon heard a sound and it took a moment for him to realize that Father Joseph had just laughed. "You know I didn't mean anythin' by it, anyway." She told Mal.

And just like that, they stopped being strangers and became guests of St. Alban's.

_oo00oo_

River watched as Mal, Book and the others boarded the miner's skiff. Like most of the vehicles in this part of the planet the skiff was designed to hover over the snow instead of riding on it directly. Snow fell year round in this part of St. Alban's and in valleys such as the one Portage was located in it piled up in massive dunes of loose, dry powder that were too dangerous to walk on. Machines that counted on the snow to support their weight didn't fare much better; a few hardy souls had tried to ride the dunes with snowmobiles, and most of them made it back, but as a rule of thumb the prospectors opted to go with hover-skiffs since those were the only things capable of bearing the loads of ore they brought to town for sale. The skiff stirred up a cloud of snow as it left, Mal and the others inside, their cargo securely tied on the back. The fading light reflected off of the powder, bathing the cave mouth in series of sparkles for a brief and evanescent moment.

River bundled up in her coat and walked back into the cargo bay of _Serenity_. Wash saw her arrive over the cameras and closed the bay doors behind her. They'd be here for a week or two, if Mal's estimations were correct. They had enough rations to last the three of them for that long, but just barely. Not that it bothered her too much; she was more than capable of going without food for a spell, and Mal had plans to come back in a few days anyway to bring the first round of supplies and an update on their progress.

River's main concern wasn't being left in the cave. It was being on the planet in the first place. Ever since they had landed a strange sense of calm had fallen over her senses. Normally her waking day and her dreams blurred together, but ever since her conversation with Book the other night and the dream before it she'd had no trouble keeping the two separate.

She enjoyed the feeling as much as she was afraid of it. Things were too normal. Things weren't _right_. And underneath it all she could still hear that keening, scraping sound, only now she was distinctly aware that it was coming from a few hundred miles to the south. Nothing good had ever come of that noise, and she was worried that it would intrude further and disturb their plans here. Worse, still, was that she might not have any control over it, and what would happen then, if it got to her?

She didn't know. For now the best she could do was lock herself in her room to put up an additional wall between her and the noise. So she did.

_oo00oo_

"So, if you don't mind my asking, what brings you out here?"

Mal looked at Zoe. Hill's question was innocent enough, but Mal had gotten the impression that a great deal of their stay's pleasantness hinged on his willingness to be straight with Joseph, and he wasn't about to ruin that. Zoe nodded and answered in Mal's stead.

"We were running a deal back in the White Sun system, off of Persephone. It went sour; the client decided that he liked his money more than he liked our services, figured he'd turn us in to the Feds so he didn't have to pay."

Mal snorted. "He paid, alright," he said.

"He did," Zoe smirked, "But we didn't get more out of it'n the satisfaction of seein' him piss himself. Had to leave atmo with next to nothing by way of supplies. Low on fuel, low on food, boat fallin' apart. This was the only place in range where we could find folk might be willin' to help us regain our bearings."

"I heard what came of the Sanchez brothers." Hill said. Mal and Zoe exchanged a significant glance. "Can't say I'm particularly torn up that we haven't harbored you before now." Hill finished.

"Didn't want to impose if we didn't need to." Mal's voice was clipped. "Still don't." he added.

"Well, you're welcome here," Hill told them. "So long as you don't bring trouble with you we'll be fine. And we've got enough fuel and rations to spare to get you off world if your trade is worth it."

"Thank you kindly." Mal said.

"Where to after here, then?" Hill asked. More questions Mal didn't feel comfortable answering; the more people who knew where he was going, the more people who could point the way to somebody trying to chase him down. And there were more than enough of those these days.

"New Melbourne," Mal said. "Our pilot has a contact out that way might be able to set us up with some work."

They wouldn't be spending long at New Melbourne, if Mal had anything to say about it. And since he was the Captain that meant they'd be on and off that planet within the space of a day. Mal got the feeling that Hill was trustworthy. Hell, he'd known the man long before he'd known (or shot) his nephew Tracey. But he didn't care much for casually dropping information like where he'd be in two weeks time. The Alliance had a way of taking trustworthy people and getting whatever they wanted from them.

"We have an inn in town." Hill told them, scratching his beard. "It's mostly used by those prospectors comin' to visit from the fringe claims. You can set up there. Price is fair."

Harmon grunted in the driver's seat. It sounded odd coming from him; kid couldn't be a day over sixteen. His voice should still be cracking.

"We can loan you a skiff as well, long as you can pay for fuel." He continued. "Doc and Kaylee can ply their trades, and we might have some work for the two of you as well." He said to Mal and Zoe, then turned to Book. "And there's always folks need prayin' for, too."

"You don't do that?" Book asked. Father Joseph shook his head.

"I'm not a man of the cloth anymore." He answered. "But I was a chaplain in the war. When it ended I took up mining but the title stayed."

Book nodded. They were coming in to Portage now. Huge mounds of snow lined the streets where the ploughs had gone through, trying to make enough of a level surface for people to walk on. Book was willing to bet that keeping the town livable was an uphill battle every day, since the snow in this area never really ended. It just moved around a bit.

Book grabbed the bag containing his few possessions (a Bible, a deck of cards and a box of cigars) as they pulled up to a stop. Before they left the skiff, Hill turned to Mal again.

"I have a couple things I need to cover with you before you settle in. Mind meeting me in my office before you hit your bunk?" he asked.

Mal nodded. "You got a place a fella like me can grab a drink and some food first?"

"Sure." Hill said. "Taggart's is about a block south of here. Man's as liable to burn your food as he is to serve it to you raw, but it should leave you full enough." Book was about to offer to go with but Zoe stopped him with a look.

"Zoe," Mal asked. "Can I trust you to cover everything here while I'm handling things?" Book nearly missed the subtle emphasis on the word _cover_.

"Yessir," Zoe answered, and shouldered her bag as she walked into the inn, following after Simon and Kaylee. Book followed, deciding that maybe a cigar and a few passages from the gospel were in order.

_oo00oo_

"Dreamer, this is Ghost. Do you copy?" Harry said. The receiver in his collar picked up his voice and transmitted it to… well, Harry couldn't be sure at this point. All he knew is that Nemo was somewhere above him. Damn man was tough to predict. After a moment without a response he tried again. "Dreamer, do you copy?"

"Copy, Ghost." The voice came back. Harry smiled and looked back to the panel of the communications relay in front of him. He pulled out a laser pen and started cutting away at the panel which would give him access to the panel's interface.

Seriously, a real honest-to-god laser pen. One with a laser that burned things instead of just shining on them. He doubted that he'd ever get tired of the things he'd seen on this side of the veil. It was almost like magic.

In another world he would have cast an _alohomora_ to open a panel like this. Never mind that the surge of quantum energy would fry the circuitry and render his entire mission moot. But he'd lost his wand somewhere in between worlds and was now forced to do things the normal way. He didn't mind at all; his magic had gone dormant shortly after his arrival in the verse and, while he missed the things he could do with it, he wasn't particularly torn up about it. Too many reminders of the world he'd come from and the things he'd left behind, and he didn't need that now. After a moment of cutting away at the panel he pulled back and rubbed his gloved hands together for warmth. St. Alban's was cold to a degree that he'd previously thought impossible, and even though he was dressed for warmth there was only so much padding he could put on his hands before he lost his ability to use them for the task at hand. He turned back to it and pulled out the mini-laser again, burning through the last of the locking mechanism and exposing the panel interface.

"I'm in the process of making the drop." Harry said as he pulled out his data-pad and linked it to the interface. "Have the charges been deployed?"

"They have. Everything's waiting on you, Ghost." He and Nemo were speaking on a secure channel, but then again, they were trying to hack into the information system of a very secure, very secret Alliance base. No way of knowing exactly what the Alliance was monitoring, so they went with code names. That way if the Alliance was alerted they would at least be able to keep some degree of anonymity. And, as Harry had quickly discovered, Nemo was all about anonymity. He wasn't even sure if that was the man's real name.

Harry was thankful that these communications interfaces were standard issue. If they'd been customized for the base then it was very possible that the simple act of breaking the lock on one of them would have triggered an alert that would have brought an entire Alliance troop down on his head. But evidently the Alliance was depending on secrecy to be their primary defense.

"Copy that, Dreamer. I've almost finished here." Harry said. His data-pad had linked up with the communications relay and immediately sent a flood of programs into it that locked it down and prevented the relay from notifying the base that it had been accessed.

"I've linked the detonation key to your data-pad, Ghost. You get to carry out the final phase of the upload since you've got visual on the relay." Nemo said.

"So I get to push the red button, then?" Harry asked.

"…" There was silence on the other end. Harry could almost picture Nemo's look of exasperation.

"You copy, Dreamer?"

"Yes, Ghost. You get to push the red button." Nemo responded.

Their plan was simple enough, at least to somebody who had the tech knowhow to infiltrate an Alliance base with S9 level clearance. The communications relay was only the first step. Harry and Nemo had a very simple, very secure package of data that they needed to upload to the base's mainframe. The communications relays were the ticket, but any anomalous uploads were easily tracked and would cause the entire base to go on lockdown.

St. Albans, though, was known for its rugged and mountainous terrain, and not every communications relay could be placed on the top of a mountain (too visible from the ground) or in a secluded valley (too visible from the air). Some of them had to be placed on a mountainside, and those were vulnerable to avalanches. The relays had been designed such that in the event that they detected an avalanche through their seismic sensors they would upload all of their data to the mainframe in one burst, to preserve any communications updates. It was a failsafe to keep the base operating even in the event that one or more of their relays went down. The updated information could be routed to surviving relays and they could cover for the function of the destroyed towers.

"Wicked. Data's been uploaded into the comm relay tower, along with the delayed masking protocol." Harry informed Nemo. "ET to detonation is five minutes, right after I get free of the critical zone."

Hitch-hiking a data package on one of the emergency uploads was, in theory, simple. Except that he had to cause an avalanche in order to do so. Harry was fond of chaos and had no problem bringing down the Wrath of God on a poor, unsuspecting relay, but he wasn't fond of being near one when it happened.

He left the panel open and returned to his skiff. No reason to cover his tracks; the avalanche would do that for him, and by the time the Alliance excavated it from under the snow and figured out that it had been hacked the data package would be gone. His hover-skiff was large enough for one man and was currently braced against a snowdrift. It didn't have an interior compartment, so Harry was completely exposed to the elements except for a thick plastic shield which kept the wind from hitting his face and hands. Getting out here had, for the most part, been miserable.

He fired up the skiff and rode gravity down the side of the mountain, tilting towards the mountain on his left side every so often to keep from gaining too much speed. When he was about two hundred feet from the valley below he changed tactics, turning so he was facing straight down the mountain and gunning the skiff engines, picking up as much acceleration as he could as he rocketed towards the valley. He must have shot into it at a speed in excess of 200 kilos per hour, and he let out a whoop as he barreled across the empty, snowy plain. Nemo had once commented that he'd never seen someone with such a natural talent for operating vehicles. Unfortunately it only extended to the small ones; anything larger than a two-seater and he was no more skilled than the next guy, though he suspected he could learn fast enough to put most to shame.

His momentum carried him across the valley and up the mountain on the other side. He'd scouted a likely path and determined where he wanted his vantage point to be when he detonated the charges. It took him a while longer to climb up the mountainside, but eventually he reached it. He left his skiff running and stayed mounted on it, pulling out his data-pad and opening up the interface.

He was greeted by the sight of a red button. He laughed. "You know me too well, Dreamer." He said. "Here goes!"

Harry pushed the red button. There was a spray of powder from the adjacent mountaintop and then a slow, low rumbling sound as snow started sliding. It roared down the mountainside, slowly at first, but picking up speed and size as it carried more snow with it until it had transformed into an unholy tidal wave of powder and ice, ripping down the mountain towards the comm relay below.

Now came the tricky part. The masking mechanism they had uploaded with the data was designed to keep it from being recognized by the comm relay, but it also prevented the relay from sending it on in the event of a data upload. If he sent the signal to remove it too soon the relay would treat it as foreign data and purge it. Too late, though, and they would have accomplished nothing. Harry needed to wait for the sensors to pick up the seismic waves of the avalanche; at that point the security protocol would be overridden as the upload started. That didn't happen until right before the avalanche hit, though.

He'd picked his vantage point so that he could get the best possible view of the communications tower. He watched intently through a set of high powered binoculars he'd brought along for the mission and his focus changed, shifted until it was almost as focused as the laser he'd used to cut open the relay in the first place.

Wait for it…

Everything else in the world stopped existing except for the tower and the thundering snow.

Wait for it….

Everything else stopped existing except for the one moment. The right moment.

Wait for it…

There it was! He pressed the button that released the masking program just as the avalanche overtook the tower. The signal tore across the valley at the speed of light and dropped the mask just as the security protocol lifted. He laughed and the world came back to him quickly, including the voice of Nemo, coming through the transmitter in his ear.

"..st! Get out of there!"

Huh? Another sound came to him. A heavy rumbling, much closer than that coming from across the valley.

Harry turned around and looked up the mountain he was on, only to see another avalanche, which had been started by the sheer volume of sound made by the first, barreling down towards him.

"Bloody hell!" he cursed and took off on his skiff. He didn't bother with taking it slow this time, angling his skiff so it pointed straight towards the valley and launching off at full speed, kicking up powder in his wake. The sound of the snow behind him spurred him on and he hit the valley below, acutely aware of the fact that he now had two mountains of snow bearing down on him from either side and very little chance of making the valley's end before they crushed him between them.

He tried anyway, gunning the engines of the skiff to provide as much extra velocity as they would allow him, he banked to the left and started shooting straight through the snow perpendicular to the oncoming avalanches, trying to escape their rage. His heart was pounding in his chest and the focus slowly came back to him. It was a small enough valley, about a kilometer across, but he had well over a thousand meters to go still and wasn't sure he'd make it. His world narrowed again until there was only the skiff and the edge of the valley in front of him.

Nine hundred meters. He pulled closer to the mountain at his left, the one he'd just been on. The oncoming snow wasn't quite as far down and it would buy him a precious few extra seconds.

Seven hundred meters. He throttled the engines, pouring as much speed as he could into them. Completely unknown to him, his magic reached out around the skiff, not damaging it, but rolling like a wheel to either side, adding velocity. Anyone watching him would have seen an extra two tracks along the snow, four feet to either side of the skiff, made by pure willpower as Harry tried to force his way to the edge of the valley.

Four hundred met… "Oh, shit!" Harry exclaimed. The pure white of the valley had completely obscured the rapid drop in the snowbank ahead of him. He shot off of it and lost control of the skiff, plummeting to the ground below, the twin avalanches roaring in his ears. The last thing he saw was white.

_oo00oo_

Mal reclined in Father Joseph's office. It was surprisingly cozy for a prospector, though Mal imagined that by this point Father Joseph was doing less prospecting and had shifted his focus to managing Portage. He looked to be better off for it, if the plush chair Mal was sitting in was any indication. Hill regarded him from behind his desk.

"I'm glad you're not avoiding this, Mal." Hill said.

"I 'spect this is a conversation needs to be had." Mal told him honestly. And it did. They were imposing enough and Hill deserved some answers to his questions. Not that Mal intended to provide _honest_ answers; those could get him and his crew shot.

"Drink?" Hill asked. He'd taken an old bottle of scotch out from under his desk and was in the process of pouring himself a glass. Mal was happy to take him up on his offer, especially since Hill poured both from the same bottle. Of course, that didn't necessarily rule out poison on the rim of the tumbler full of scotch Mal was now holding, but poison didn't seem much like Father Joseph's style and as long as he wasn't sending up any major red flags with his actions Mal felt he was safe.

"'Bout two years ago you an' your crew deliver my nephew's body to me/" Hill said, taking a sip of his scotch. He leaned back in his seat, looking out the window to his left. "At the time we didn't ask too many questions. The pain was too fresh, right? So I was inclined to take the story you gave us and just bury my nephew and grieve like a good uncle should. Organ smuggling, pissed off the wrong people. Sound right so far?" he asked.

"'Bout so." Mal answered honestly.

"So, Alliance boards your ship, things go south. Some words are exchanged, maybe some bullets, too? You were a bit spare on the details." Hill took another drink of his scotch. Mal followed suit.

"Here's the thing, Mal." Hill said. "Before I was out here I was a soldier. I know the Alliance. I know their guns. High velocity, right? Them bullets can punch clean through a man. Small hole in front, nasty exit wound. You must have seen enough of that in the war yourself, right?"

Mal nodded and drank more of his scotch. He didn't like where this was going and planned to be liquored up properly for when the shit hit the fan.

"I've been shot a couple times myself. Medics told me it was the grace of God that it was an Alliance rifle did the damage. If the velocity had been lower, if the bullet had stuck in me, well, I wouldn't be prospectin' right now."

"Don't sell yourself short." Mal quipped. "You're a pretty hardy fellow."

"Tracey didn't have an exit wound, Mal." Hill said. His face had long since gone back to being grim. Mal's drink shifted almost unnoticeably to his left hand while his right moved slowly down to the holster at his side. "Tells me it wasn't Alliance. Bullet wound in his back doesn't speak good things, either, Mal."

A soft and unmistakable click came from under Father Joseph's desk and Mal's hand froze at his side.

"I think it was your guns that did him in, Mal. Maybe the one you're reachin' for right now. Might want to move your hand away from that, though."

Mal set his jaw and finished off his scotch. Father Joseph did the same. At least Mal had him pegged properly; Hill wasn't a poisonin' type of guy. He was a shotgun type of guy.

"Y'know, Mal, at this range, this level, I expect ol' Bessie here would tear your gut wide open. You'd bleed out quick, but it'd be a mite painful, don't you think?" Hill asked, setting his glass down on the table.

"So why ain't I lyin' in a puddle of my own innards right now?" Mal said. All the friendly airs had been dropped at this point, and Mal looked about ready to draw on Hill and try his luck.

"You're a good man, Mal." Hill said. That caught Mal off guard. Normally people didn't point shotguns at the folk they liked.

"See, I know you, Mal. And I know what kind of man Tracey was. You care for your crew, and Tracey, well, he was a lot of things, but I'd never have accused him of bein' bright." Hill smiled. A bit forced, but it got his point across. He reached for the bottle of scotch and poured another two glasses, sliding the second towards Mal. "I want to know what happened, Mal. And I want you to be honest with me. Turns out you murdered him, the way I fear, then we'll let the law handle it properly, follow?"

Mal nodded and grabbed the drink. His original plan of lying had suddenly become much more dangerous. And he was fairly sure that when Hill talked about the law, he was really referring to Ol' Bessie under the desk in front of him. "Sounds fair to me." Mal said.

"You lie to me, though," Hill said, "especially now, when you got good reason not to, then I'm gonna have to assume you're a threat to me an' mine, and none of you will leave this rock. Understand?"

Mal nodded. His jaw was still working furiously; he hated being cornered, especially by folk he trusted. But he knew where Joseph was coming from; he'd have done the same thing had the spots been reversed. Well, maybe not the same thing; there'd have been less listening and more bullets. So he figured it was distinctly possible that Joseph was a better man than him. He leaned back in his chair and downed the rest of his scotch, then placed the glass on the desk in front of him.

"More?" Mal asked. He'd need as much courage as he could get for this. He was going to be honest with the man in front of him, and there was a good chance it could cost him his life. Hill nodded and poured the two of them one more round.

"Me an' Zoe agreed to take him on, see what we could do to bail him out of his trouble, then see him on his way," Mal said, grabbing the glass. "On account of Du-Khang, follow?"

Hill nodded. "Go on," he said.

"Alliance stopped our ship. Demanded to board or they'd shoot us out of the sky. Tracey wasn't havin' none of it. Told us to hide him, to keep the Alliance from boarding. To do anything, really, 'cept by then he wasn't thinkin' too clear." Mal looked down at his glass. "One of our crew, the Shepherd, found somethin' to suggest that the Alliance officer in charge might not be so clean. Might not have stumbled across us by accident, _dong ma_?"

Joseph nodded again. The two of them had locked gazes and neither of them were willing to look away.

"So we decide to take a gambit." Mal continued. "Let the Alliance board, use the information as leverage. Convince the officer it might be in his best interest to let us go our own way. But Tracey overhears, thinks we're turnin' on him. Things come to a head in the cargo bay. Tracey has more'n a few unkind words for us, 'bout how easy we were to take advantage of. He shoots my pilot, Zoe's husband, and she shoots him back. Gets him in the chest. Then he grabs Kaylee and takes her hostage." There; a small flicker in Joseph's gaze. Mal knew the man was about as fond of Kaylee as he was. She had that effect on people. This might not turn out as bad as he thought. "Another of our crew tries to sneak up behind him. When he turns, Kaylee breaks away and I put a second round in him."

There was a moment of tense silence between the two of them as Joseph considered what to do with that information. Finally, Mal heard the click of the shotgun again as Joseph disengaged it. He breathed a sigh of relief and took another drink. Damn, but it burned on the way down. How had he not noticed that earlier?

"One more question, Mal." Joseph said. He sounded… tired. Old. Disappointed. "Plenty of room in space to hide a body. Especially when you knew it might stir up trouble here. Why'd you send it back, Mal?" he asked.

"It was what he asked us to do." Mal said. He was exhausted, too. "He was still with us at Du Khang."

And in the end, that's all that really mattered. Both Joseph and Mal were soldiers. Maybe it wasn't enough of an explanation for somebody else, but it was all the two of them needed to know. Joseph finished off the last of his drink and stared down at the empty glass.

"His family doesn't know about this, Mal." He said. "Couldn't piece it together, and I wasn't inclined to tell them my suspicions when I didn't have the full story. Keep it that way, right?"

Mal nodded. "What about Harmon?" he asked.

"Harmon's too much like his brother. One of these days it'll be his body comes back to us." Joseph sighed. "He doesn't know, though. All he knows is you were there when his brother died. Blames you for not saving him."

"He's not far off." Mal said.

"No. He's not." Hill agreed. He nodded his head and Mal turned to leave, breathing a sigh of relief.

Mal opened the door and stepped outside into the frigid cold. He looked off to the hillside to the west and there was a small glint of light from the top of it.

"We're clear, Zoe. Thanks for the cover." Mal said. The miniature radio under his collar picked it up. Her message came back through the transmitter bud in his ear.

"That was a bit too close for comfort, Sir." Zoe said. Up on the hilltop she began to disassemble her rifle and pack it back into her bag.

"Can't blame a man for lookin' out for what's his." Mal's voice came back through her own transmitter.

"Yes you can, sir." She stated. "But I understand if you don't want to this time."

"Fair enough." Mal responded. After a moment he added another thought. "Thanks for stoppin' the Shepherd from coming to Taggart's. Not sure how we would've worked around that one."

"Couldn't let 'em think we were usin' him to pass messages, Sir. Wouldn't have ended well for him." She said as she finished packing her bag and started down the hill. "Think he's figured it out by now?"

"I'm sure he has." Mal answered. "What side you think he served on?"

"I'm sure that's none of my business, sir." She replied. "Not sure I'd like the answer, anyway."

_oo00oo_

Back inside the cabin, Father Joseph reached under his desk again and pulled out the radio that had been mounted next to Ol' Bessie. "Isaac, Abe. You copy?"

"Yessir" a voice crackled from the other end.

"Our conversation match what you're getting' from the Shepherd and the Doctor?"

"Yeah, Joseph. Their stories line up."

"Let 'em go, then." Joseph said. "No need to shed blood over this."

_oo00oo_

_**Translation Notes  
><strong>_

**F**_**èi xuè** – _Waste of blood. Term used primarily in some of the seedier areas of the Kalidasa system. Implies that the blood flowin' through a particular man's veins could be put to better use than sustaining him (like transplants, or decorating walls).  
><em><strong>Qù tā mā de zìji<strong> – _Go f*ck yourself  
><em><strong>Àirén<strong> – _Lover. Can also be used to mean "husband," "wife," or "precious."  
><em><strong>Dong ma?<strong> – _Understand?

_oo00oo_

_**World Notes**_

For those of you who've watched the series, and specifically the episode "The Message," the character of Joseph Hill is based off of Joss Whedon's cameo in the episode. Joss' full name is Joseph Hill Whedon. My character is Joseph W. Hill. If you watch the funeral at the end and spot Joss you'll have a good idea of what Hill looks like.

My information regarding planets such as St. Alban's is based on information provided in the Firefly RPG book and internet works such as _The Verse in Numbers_. Frequently, though, to further flesh out the history of the planets and places I have to add or create details of my own. Hence the continents of New Alaska, Dorado, and the town of Portage are all of my own creation. (Portage is the name of a glacier in Alaska. I used to be a resident so I decided to draw in that small piece of my life and use it to flesh out the story.)

The 'winter madness' Simon refers to is something of a cross between cabin fever and depression with mood-congruent delusions. I thought it up and to my knowledge it doesn't really exist. Cortisol does exist; it's an actual hormone which the body mobilizes to produce the fight/flight response. The theory as far as this story is concerned is that a shot of cortisol will agitate the body enough to provide a very temporary relief for the winter madness, but as I have no medical experience you may not want to take that at face value. Cortisol does, however, suppress the immune system, and is part of the reason why long-term, sustained stress has negative effects of a person's health.

_Zhu Que_ is the name of the Red Sun, situated at the center of (surprise!) the Red Sun system, where St. Alban's is located. For those of you who are interested in learning more about the general layout of the Firefly universe, I recommend doing a Google search for three separate resources; The first is the Serenity RPG core book, the second is a fan document floating around the web called "The Verse in Numbers." The final one is a map of the verse. I was lucky enough to track down an interactive flash version on the web, but have been unable to find it a second time.


	4. Winter II

_**Disclaimer: **__I do not own Harry Potter. I do not own Firefly. Joss and J.K. have not invited me to partake in that particular party, which is fine; I like my own party better. The dress code is easier and I know all the steps. So let's party!_

* * *

><p><em><strong>Episode One: The Endless Winter<br>Chapter II: The Wolves They Let Live**_

_oo00oo_

_Now halt your minds and listen to their cry_  
><em>From northern alters formed of snow and ice,<em>  
><em>Beneath celestial curtains in their sky,<em>  
><em>The wolves give evensong of sacrifice.<em>  
><em>All creatures stop, transfixed by somber hymns<em>  
><em>Which rise from frozen mountains to the stars<em>  
><em>To one whose understanding never dims.<em>

"The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness" – John Hubbard Bidwell

, _oo00oo_

"Ugh…"

Harry's vision blurred and then slowly resolved itself into cloudy skies and snow. Sometime while he had been out, the night had lifted, and now the skies above him were painted with the dull, dusky orange of early sunrise. He tried to look around and flinched at a sharp pain in his shoulder.

"Ghost!" Nemo's voice crackled through on the comm. He sounded relieved. "Do you copy?"

"Copy, Dreamer." Harry croaked. "How long was I out?"

"It's been a few hours, Ghost." Nemo informed him. Harry cursed under his breath; the mission wasn't supposed to go south like this. The hours he had spent unconscious left the Alliance with ample time to send out a surveillance team to investigate the wreckage. "What's your status?" Nemo asked.

That was a good question. Harry shifted around in the snow and took inventory of his body. How is it that he wasn't buried? He clearly remembered two very large mountains of snow bearing down on him just before he blacked out. No matter; he tested his arms and legs to see if they could still move. They could, but not without protest.

"Feels like I just got violated by a yeti, Dreamer."

"Well, at least your razor sharp wit is still intact." Nemo quipped. "I assume that the rest of you is in decent condition?"

"Copy that, Dreamer," Harry said. "Nothing broken but my pride."

"Good. It was getting inflated." Nemo answered. Harry smiled and then grimaced as he stretched. He looked over his body, pleased to see that his assessment was correct; nothing was broken. Slowly he started working his legs and his arms, willing them to move until he finally felt like he could lift himself off of the snow into sitting position. He looked around to see if he could find his skiff.

"I've been monitoring comm traffic from the Alliance base, Ghost" Nemo's voice spoke through his earpiece again. "They've dispatched an assessment team to your site. ETA is one hour." He finished. Harry cursed. One hour was cutting it way too close. The original plan had him out of there with four hours to spare. He finally managed to bring himself to his feet and turned in a slow circle, trying to spot his skiff. "Can you extract yourself in that time?" Nemo asked.

Harry finally spotted his skiff and muttered an obscenity under his breath. "Skiff's destroyed, Dreamer" he answered. "Negative on the extraction."

"_Bùxìng. _There's no chance of full extraction?"

"Negative. The skiff's in pieces." And it was; the force of the avalanche had crushed the skiff against a large, rocky outcropping that had been hidden by the snow. It was lucky that Harry had been thrown clear of the skiff or he would probably be in pieces, as well. Harry spotted a hunk of twisted metal that he believed might be the engine of the skiff. He couldn't be sure, though. "Mission is compromised." Harry said, and a brief feeling of despair bloomed in his chest. They had done all this work, for nothing. They would have to send the self-destruct command to the data package they had uploaded and try again later, if they could manage to find a new time to try at all; the Alliance was very good at plugging holes in their security.

"How much longer can you fend off the eyes in the sky?" Harry asked Nemo. He knew that by now Nemo had hacked their surveillance satellites to buy him some extra time. If he hadn't, the satellites would have registered his thermal signature, lying in the valley, and the planet would have already gone on lockdown as the Alliance initiated a full manhunt for him.

"Not indefinitely, Ghost. I'm feeding them a series of false visual and thermal imaging loops through the satellite right now. To them, your location appears untouched," Nemo said, and Harry smiled. If nothing else, that man was very, very good at his job. "Once they find the skiff, though, they will know about my interference and run full bio scans of the area."

"_Xié'è de gǒupì." _This time Harry cursed out loud. Everything was ruined.

"Extracting yourself is top priority, Ghost." Nemo's voice came through the earpiece, ever the voice of reason. "We can find another way as long as you're not compromised. Can you make the rendezvous?"

That was the question, now wasn't it? "Sounds like I'll have to." Harry said. "Will you be there?"

"Roger that." Nemo replied. "I'm already planetside. Make the rendezvous, Ghost. If you can't do it before they spot that skiff I won't be able to assist." Left unsaid was that if Harry didn't make the rendezvous, Nemo would be trapped on the surface for days while the Alliance ran their tracking scans. And if Harry was found too close to the ship's landing point then that put Nemo in very great danger.

"Shiny." Harry drawled, checking himself to make sure he'd be good to travel. "Do what you can to stall for me, yeah?"

"I'm already working on it, Ghost." Nemo replied. "Now hurry. You've got five clicks to go and maybe a bit more than an hour if you're lucky."

Five clicks. One hour, on foot in the snow. Harry wasn't sure if that was possible, but he was going to try. He wished he could still apparate, but when his magic had gone dormant it had done so completely. He reached around his back and breathed a sigh of relief; he still had his mini-skis on him, lashed to his back on either side of his rifle. At least he would be able to make good time down the mountain. That might be enough to get him to safety. He un-latched the skis from the harness on his back and began the process of binding them to his feet. "You know me, Dreamer." He said. "I'm nothing if not lucky."

He gauged the valley around him. The wind was picking up and would cover his tracks out of the valley. It might even cover up the skiff and mask it long enough to buy him a few more minutes before they used their scanners on the valley and detected it. Once they ran their bio-scans, though, he was humped.

He began his slow march to the edge of the valley. Beyond the edge it was a gentle downhill slope for at least three clicks. His skis should be able to get him through that in a reasonable amount of time. The forest beyond that was what had him worried. He started moving, one step at a time, his body still protesting from the pounding it had taken earlier. In his haste to make the rendezvous he didn't notice that the skiff behind him slowly started to disintegrate, turning white like snow, breaking into flakes and flying away with the building wind.

_oo00oo_

"Two pairs. She wins," River announced with a smirk on her face as she laid her two cards on the table. "On the river." She added, for good measure.

"Gorrammit!" Jayne barked. His face was turning an interesting shade of red and his left eye was twitching. "You filthy little _zuòbì mǔgǒu! _You agreed 'fore you sat down there'd be no readin'!"

Wash sat at the side of the dinner table, fighting valiantly to keep from laughing. "He's right, River," he drawled. He sounded patronizing, but overly so; River could tell he was putting on airs. "I distinctly remember a no-reading clause in our little poker agreement."

"Not reading." She informed them. "Using probability theory."

"Oh, now Jayne, she does have a point." Wash quipped. "You never said she couldn't use _math_."

"What's math got to do with _gorram_ poker!" Jayne yelled as he shot up from his seat, looking for all the world like he wanted to strangle the ninety pound slip of a girl in front of him. He wouldn't try, though; River could kill him with her brain. Or her hands. Or her feet. Or the towels hanging on the rack in the kitchen. Or anything, really.

Wash stared at Jayne for a brief moment, the toothpick almost dropping out from between his lips. "You know, Jayne," he finally said, "I'm starting to think there's a reason you do all the chores on this ship."

"She concurs." River stated as she gathered the slips of paper from the table in front of her. IOU's for chores and favors. Good as gold on _Serenity_.

Jayne grumbled from his spot at the head of the table, glaring murder at the diminutive girl collecting the chips. "Little moon-brained p_iànzi." _He looked to Wash for support.

"Whoah, Hey! Don't look at me!" Wash said, throwing up his hands in mock surrender. "I only agreed to play because I think it's funny when she gets you to turn all purple-ish."

Jayne's death glare moved from River to Wash. A low beep sounded from the comm on the bridge, signaling an incoming transmission.

"Ookaay. I'll just see what's going on with the others." Wash said as he retreated to the bridge. Jayne glared at him as he left, then turned back to River. She was staring at him with those damned wide, crazy eyes.

Jayne squinted at her. So she wanted to stare? Two could play that game. He sat back in his seat and glared right back at her.

Up on the bridge Wash slumped into his pilot seat and pressed the incoming transmission button. "Yello!" he said.

"Well don't you just sound all happy?" Kaylee chimed in from the other end of the line.

"Oh, yeah." He bragged. "You really oughta be here. I managed to trick Jayne into letting River play cards."

Kaylee laughed. She had such a charming laugh. Wash liked talking on the comm with her. Much more fun than speaking with Mal. Not as fun as speaking with Zoe, though. "Well, cap'n asked me to check in on account of him an' Zoe bein' indisposed." She said.

"Oh, indisposed, are they?" Wash said. "Well, I hope she's not being too rough on him," He joked. "She's broken stronger men. Like me, for instance."

The comm. was an audio-only transmission. Somehow, though, he could still see the wicked grin on Kaylee's face. "I 'spect I'll just have to tell 'em that when they get back, now won't I?"

"No!" He almost yelled. "Oh, God, please no. She'd kill me." He said. "And then she'd kill me again! And then he'd kill me, too."

"And?" Kaylee asked, her voice full of mock innocence.

"And my dying wish would be that they make you clean up the mess."

"Aww! C'mon. That's no fair." She complained.

"Nope. I'd do it. Man's dying wish, too; they'd have to honor it." He said, glancing towards the entrance to the bridge.

River's voice drifted up through the hatch, coming from the dining hall. "He blinks."

"Gorrammit!" Jayne yelled. Wash grimaced. He loved entertainment but Jayne sounded like he was getting ready to break the table.

"Anyhow, Father Joe hired 'em to check out some trouble the prospectors' been havin'." She updated him. "They're lookin at it today 'fore the blizzard comes in."

"How about the others?" Wash asked, but he was looking nervously towards the dining room.

"Simon's been helpin' out townsfolk. Jus' started, really. We ain't been up too long." She yawned. "Shepherd's been shepherdin'. Jus' leaves me all by my lonesome here 'till I'm needed. Money's gonna be good, though. Mal figures we got three days afore we can hit atmo."

"Glad to hear! Everything's doing fine on this end." Wash said. There was a loud crash from the dining hall and he groaned. Everything was definitely not fine on this end. "I should probably go check that, though. Before River kills Jayne, you know?"

"You tell 'em to make nice now." Kaylee said.

"Will do. Gotta go!" And with that Wash was out of his seat and running towards the kitchen, ready to bravely put himself in harm's way to protect the refrigerator.

_oo00oo_

River smiled and looked at the ceiling above her bunk. She was still riding the high from the poker game; contrary to Jayne's accusations, she hadn't read him once. The thought of it still amazed her; normally she had no control over her reading. It came and went as it wanted to, thoughts drifting towards her unbidden, opening themselves up to her and spilling their secrets without any conscious control on her part. It drove her mad sometimes, in more ways than one. She longed to place boundaries on her own mind but until now it had eluded her, and there were precious few times in the past two years that she had been able to sit alone amidst the cloud of thoughts surrounding her and draw a clear line between them, dividing the River from the non-River, the thoughts that were hers from the ones that were forced upon her.

She still heard the ominous sound in the distance, like the sound of fingernails scratching across a blackboard or the sound of a metal bar being dragged across concrete. Over the past few hours it had changed, though. Not in it's fundamental frequency, but its timbre had slowly begun to shift and resolve itself into not just one, but two separate sounds. The scratch still underlay it all, but the rest? How could she describe it? A perfect sine wave, a lone clear note above the scraping. A flute? A clarinet? A hum? It held a steady note and she found the sound much more palatable than she had before. And focusing on the new aspects of the sound gave her something she had never possessed before.

Control.

She experimented with it during the poker game. In between hands she would try to open her mind to see if Jayne's thoughts drifted towards her. After the cards were down she would turn her attention to Wash. He knew she was reading him but didn't mind; for him the game was the thing, not the winnings, and he'd told them after that he was willing to sit down and play for the simple pleasure of seeing Jayne frustrated.

For her it was an experiment, and a successful one at that. Nothing good had ever come of that sound before, and she was still wary of it. But then again, it had never sounded like it did now.

_oo00oo_

Portage did not have a medical clinic. It was too small a town and trained medical professionals tended to avoid settling down in communities where there wasn't enough business to support them. As a rule of thumb most of the medical care provided to a community like Portage was either self-administered or taken care of by itinerant doctors or medics like Simon, who were just passing through. When word had spread around town that a doctor was coming he had been deluged with requests for everything from minor surgery to psychiatric counseling. He did what he could, but some of the requests brought to him were well outside of his areas of specialty.

He'd woken early in the morning after far too little sleep. Worse, his charity had been sorely tested the previous night, when a few of Father Joseph's men had brought him into a separate room of the hotel and questioned him at gunpoint about the death of Tracey Smith. Apparently they had done the same with Book, and Mal had been questioned by Father Joe himself. Simon understood that it was Hill's best option for getting at the truth and protecting his community, but Simon had stared down the barrel of a gun far too often these past few years and had no sympathy for anybody willing to subject him to it. Still, they needed the credits to keep flying.

They. Simon wondered when he had started thinking of himself as part of a "they." For the longest time it had been him and River against the world. Even in the months he'd spent on board _Serenity_ he still maintained a clear boundary between his interests and those of the crew. But at some point those boundaries had shifted. It was probably due to Kaylee; she was part of _Serenity_, was happy being that way, and once he'd bound himself to her then he became a part of it, too. He still longed for his life back in the core, but he'd made his choice and discarded all of that in order to save his sister, and he'd made it again when he fell in love with a ship's mechanic from one of the border worlds. There was no going back.

Help at the clinic had come in the form of a young midwife named Jinnah. She was in her late teens, the daughter of a man from the equatorial cities who'd been drawn into prospecting by the promise of hitting a rich vein of ore and making easy money. He hadn't had much luck, though, and Jinnah worked a few jobs around town on the side to supplement their income. She had promise. She was bright enough for medical training and compassionate enough that if she became a medic she wasn't likely to use her position to profit at the expense of her patients. He'd contemplated talking with Joseph to see if he'd be interested in sponsoring her attendance at one of the small medical academies on the equator. Three years of training would be enough for her to handle most of the problems Portage faced. A few of the itinerant doctors who passed through the area seemed more interested in getting the miners addicted to opiates instead of helping them with their injuries. It was a dirty trade, but profitable. A medic in town who had ties to the community would offset that, and it would provide Jinnah with more money to support herself and her father as he continued his quest for the big payoff.

The man they were treating now had a badly set bone in his arm. It had broken a year back during a minor cave in but he didn't have the knowledge to set it properly. As a result, it was putting pressure on the nerve and muscle surrounding the break and made it almost impossible for him to work. Simon had given the man a once-over and determined it would be possible to re-break it and fix it here. He'd need to sedate the man, first, though.

"Jinnah," he said. "Can you get me about fifty milligrams of pethidine?" He turned back to the patient. "You're going to want to be unconscious for this." He explained. It would take a while for the weaker opiate to kick in, but it should do the trick long enough for them to re-set the bone.

Jinnah brought him a syringe full of the pethidine and stood back to watch. He had no idea why; it was just an injection. A small voice in the back of his head suggested that she might be smitten with him. He didn't like that. It would make it distinctly more awkward for him to teach her. But he would work with what he had.

_oo00oo_

Harry paused and drew in a deep breath. The chill of the air burned his lungs. When he exhaled it came out as a plume of mist. He took a moment to tighten his hood and to pull up the scarf around his neck so it covered the lower half of his face.

"There's only a couple more clicks remaining, Ghost. You can do this." Nemo's voice chimed in from the ear-bud.

"Bullshit, Dreamer." Harry said. "Most of that was downhill and there's still over two clicks to go." It had taken him a half an hour to get as far as he had. Both of them knew he had no chance of making the rendezvous. But Nemo's insistence on waiting was a kind gesture, if nothing else. "I'm humped. You should take off and break atmo before the scanners force you to lay low for days."

"I have no qualms about laying low for days, Ghost." Nemo responded. "I do, however, have issues with leaving you behind unless it is absolutely necessary." There was a brief beat and finally he added "You're far too useful to me."

"Well, thanks." The sarcasm in Harry's voice was evident, even through his scarf. "Glad to know you've grown attached."

"Perhaps." Nemo said. "But that's not why I'm staying. As I said, you're useful."

Harry laughed wryly. Neither he nor Nemo harbored any illusions of friendship, or at least not the kind of friendship most people thought of when they used the word. Their conversations were amiable and intelligent. They had laughed together and fought together. Nemo had trained him in the ways of the 'verse and how to survive in it and for that Harry was grateful. But underlying their every interaction was one undeniable truth.

They were of use to each other. Nemo had captured the sentiment well. Any feelings they had built upon that foundation were secondary, and on the day they stopped being of use to each other they would part ways. Nemo was a ruthless pragmatist. Harry had made his friends in another life, abandoned them when he cast himself through the veil, and was not looking to make more. Whatever small loyalty they had built towards each other over the past year served only to modulate their interactions, not to bind them together.

Lost in his thoughts as he trekked forward, Harry almost failed to notice the shadow moving out of the corner of his eye. Almost. "Dreamer, we have a problem." He said.

"Oh?" Nemo's voice sounded as if Harry had just offered to tell him an interesting fact about the weather, instead of informing him of a problem which could potentially jeopardize their escape from the planet. Harry had grown used to it; everything was weather to Nemo.

"Wolves," Harry said. "Pack of 'em." Harry calmed his mind and listened to the world around him for the telltale whisper of wolf paws on the snow.

"Best to kill them quickly, then." Nemo answered. "I trust you still have your gun?"

"That I do. A man never leaves his weapon behind, right?" Harry said.

"I'm glad to see that you've taken so well to your lessons." Nemo quipped. Nemo had beat that particular lesson into his head very quickly. Harry had been very good at carrying his wand with him wherever he went. It fit well into his pocket, or into the holster he'd rigged up on his wrist later on in life. Guns did not fit well in his pocket. In less than a week Nemo had managed to convince him of the importance of carrying one anyway. Nemo's training involved bullets. They made it much more effective.

Harry reached around behind his back and removed the rifle from its sling. It operated off of a magazine so he didn't need to waste time reloading between shots, which was good. Once he brought the first wolf down he wouldn't have enough time to reload the old-fashioned way. Not when he was dealing with a pack. He shouldered the rifle and peered through the scope, once again calming himself and listening. Two wolves off to his right, one to his left. Two somewhere in the forest behind him and one ahead.

The wolves to his right would die first. Two of them close together meant less time between shots. The quicker he killed them, the smaller the pack got and the less threat it posed. He swung around, bringing his rifle to bear, and sighted the first wolf as it moved through the trees.

A loud crack echoed throughout the forest and the first wolf dropped, a bullet in its heart. It didn't even have time to make a sound. A second later there was a second crack and the second wolf dropped. This one didn't die as fast and it let out a piteous whimper before going silent. He swung around to face the two wolves behind him and saw that they were already advancing on him, all snarls and growls, their ears flat against their heads. He smiled as he aligned the next one within his crosshairs and dropped it with a bullet to the brainpan. It flopped over awkwardly onto its side and laid still as he sighted the next one, chambering the next bullet as he did so.

*CRACK*

This one was less than ten feet away and was getting ready to leap at him when the bullet caught it in the neck. It wasn't a clean shot and the wolf crumpled to the snow, rolling around and howling in agony as a spray of blood erupted from its throat. Harry didn't have the time to appreciate the sight; he heard the growl of the pack leader as it advanced on him from behind and whirled just in time to block the brunt of its leap with the barrel of his rifle before the wolf charging him from his left barreled into him, knocking him to the snow.

This was bad. This was the last position he wanted to be in with one of these beasts, let alone two. The wolf that had struck him had bit into his shoulder but found little purchase on the loose fabric of his jacket. But that was the lesser concern right now; Harry grabbed his rifle with both hands and smashed the butt of the rifle into the face of the alpha wolf, who was charging for his throat. It bought him a precious second and his hand snaked down to his side, grabbing the combat knife sheathed in his belt. He rolled to the side as the second wolf backed away from his shoulder, preparing to go for the neck, and his left hand caught the wolf by the scruff of the neck, giving him just enough purchase to hold onto it as he drove the knife between its ribs one, two, three, four times until finally he stabbed something especially vital. There was another whimper, another whine, and the wolf went limp in his hands.

The alpha was quicker to recover than Harry had thought and for the first time he felt real pain as the beast leaped up and bit his right arm, teeth digging into the meat of his tricep above the elbow. His knife fell out of his hands as the wolf dropped back to the ground and he swore, both in pain and the realization that if he went for his knife it would leave his throat open to the wolf. He crouched and the two of them circled each other for a brief moment, the wolf snarling at him, preparing to move in for the next strike, and Harry trying to figure out how to get to one of his weapons. The rifle was about five feet off to his left but with the damage to his arm he could barely lift it even if he had it. Going for the knife was just a plain bad idea. Hell, just about anything at this point was a bad idea. The alpha was a particularly nasty specimen of the wolves in these parts, easily heavy enough that Harry, wounded as he was, would have no chance against it on the ground without some sort of weapon. He moved slowly towards his rifle, figuring that at this range if he could lift it enough with his left hand he could still get in a fatal shot, but the wolf darted around and cut off his access.

Harry cursed again. He couldn't get to the knife, couldn't get to the gun. He couldn't wait it out because if it didn't attack it would burn up the precious few minutes he needed to make it back to the ship. He only had one course left he could think of. Still facing the wolf, he lifted his left hand and used it to unzip the heavy winter jacket he was wearing, sliding it off of his shoulders and holding it in front of him loosely with both hands. The wolf, seeing that he'd shed what little armor he had, charged him, intent on driving him to the ground and going for the kill.

Harry tried to lift up his coat to intercept the wolf, intending to wrap the thing around it's head just long enough to give him a chance to go for his knife, but his right arm gave out before he could complete the motion and the wolf wound up on top of him again, the coat doing almost nothing to stop it. This time it bit into his right wrist and raked its claws against his chest. Harry hissed and saw red, and his anger took over. The wolf let go of his wrist for a fraction of a second to bite him again but instead of pulling away Harry used the little strength left in is arm to re-orient it and then shoved his hand into the wolf's mouth. He grabbed onto it with his left hand, ignoring the claws as they raked his chest, and rolled to the side, pinning the wolf below him, using his weight to drive his arm down the wolf's throat up to his elbow. The wolf raked his chest with its claws again until Harry pinned them using his own body weight. And then Harry let the wolf choke. It took about three minutes for it to stop moving, but its struggles slowed and then stopped, and when they did, Harry pulled his arm out of the creature's throat and rose unsteadily to his feet.

Harry took a brief moment to regain his balance and stood, still bleeding freely, while he took inventory of himself. His right arm was close to useless and was oozing blood along with his chest. He was also bleeding from a gash on his face that he hadn't even felt until the fight was over.

"How much time do I have left, Dreamer?" he asked as he stumbled over to his rifle. He held it loosely in his left hand as he trudged back over to the alpha. One last crack echoed throughout the forest as he put a bullet in it's heart, just to be safe.

"Twenty-five minutes, Ghost. Can you make it?"

Two and a half kilometers in twenty five minutes, in the snow, on flat ground. He couldn't. The only skiff the two had between them was ruined, Nemo couldn't land his ship in the forest, or anywhere else in this terrain for that matter, except for at the rendezvous point. And when the Alliance discovered his skiff and used their satellites to run bio-scans across the area he'd be found. And he was bleeding quick enough that without spending another five minutes on treatment he'd bleed out before he got there. He was humped.

"If I can't, I suspect we'll know in the next click or so, won't we?" he said. He reached into one of the pouches on his coat and pulled out a bottle of Alliance standard-issue medical sealant, and not for the first time thanked Nemo for his near-flawless planning. He took the cap off of the sealant and started to apply it to his wounds; wherever it touched it rapidly foamed and then hardened, creating a makeshift bandage that would hold off the blood-loss long enough for him to get back to the ship where Nemo could give him some proper field treatment. If one of the wolves had gotten to a major artery no amount of sealant would have helped him, but thankfully that wasn't the case.

"Just make it here, Ghost." Nemo said.

"I'm not gonna stop moving until I'm there or until I die, Dreamer." He responded.

"Impressive." Nemo answered after a moment. He'd shed the patronizing tone, and Harry had no idea what was going through the man's mind at the moment. "It seems you even learned the lessons that can't be taught."

"I learned that one a long time before I met you, Dreamer." Harry answered as he finished applying the sealant. He put the cap back on it and grabbed his jacket, slowly sliding back into it. Using his left arm he put the rifle back in its sling on his back, and then dug through the snow to find his knife, re-holstering it.

The wolf he'd dropped with a bullet to the throat was still alive. It had stopped struggling and grown still as it bled out, and now it lay in the snow, gazing at him from a few feet away from where he'd dropped the knife. Harry stared at it for a moment.

"_Gāng mó._" He said, then turned around and started trekking back towards the rendezvous.

_oo00oo_

"You reckon it was a wolf did this?" Mal asked, eyeing the crusted blood in the dirt below him.

"Looks like." Zoe answered. Mal looked around the miner's claim around him. It had belonged to a fellow named McMurdo. The man had been the mostly solitary type, with a tendency to work late into the night, according to the few nearby prospectors he spoke with. More often than not he slept in his claim instead of the small cabin he'd built up the hill; heating was cheap for those who could afford the initial pay for the right tech, and McMurdo had struck a vein of palladium ore a few years back that was more than sufficient for him to see to acquiring some small luxuries.

It was also what killed him. As the story went, he left the thin doors he'd installed at the entrance to his claim unlocked when he bedded down in his tunnel for the night and a wolf got in. He hadn't woken in time and the wolf got his throat before he could even put up a struggle, then dragged him off once he had bled out. At least, that was the story. His friend Vostok had come to check on him after a few days and found wolf tracks and signs of a struggle. Mal had a brief spell of experience tracking back when he'd lived on Shadow, before he joined the Independents, and the tracks in the cave seemed to confirm Vostok's story. Only five sets of tracks on the ground; his and Zoe's, both of which had the barred pattern common to boots issued by the Independents, worn down over the years until it was almost un-noticeable; McMurdo and Vostok's, both of which had a curious cross-shaped pattern which suggested they'd been ordered from one of the industries in the equatorial zone of St. Albans instead of being made in Portage. And, of course, there were the wolf's paw prints. Still…

"Something's not addin' up here, Zoe." Mal said. Zoe was crouched low, examining the tracks by the light of one of the gas lamps McMurdo kept in his claim. She looked up at him and raised an eyebrow. "Call it a feelin' I get." He confessed.

"Your feelings haven't brought us a lot of good fortune these past few years, sir." Zoe said. Straight and to the point, as usual.

"Can't say you're wrong," Mal agreed. "But you're the better tracker, so tell me, is there any other way to look at these tracks?"

"Seems pretty clear cut to me," she gestured to the tracks in front of her. There was a large patch of dust which had mixed with fresh blood and crusted over. "Wolf did him in here while he was sleepin'. Got him in the throat." She said. Mal grunted. He was an amateur compared to Zoe and even he could see that. "You can see here where he struggled, though by the time he was awake enough to put up a fight, he was weak from blood loss. After that, wolf dragged him off to God knows where." She finished. "Can't be far, though." She added as an afterthought.

"That so?" Mal was curious as to how she drew that conclusion.

"Wolf likely went to ground when it picked up on the oncoming blizzard." She explained. "Also, it'd have to be big, to drag off a man of McMurdo's weight, and even then it likely couldn't drag him far. Like as not we'll find his body somewhere nearby, and maybe we can track it from there."

"Plus Joe did lend us that bio-scanner." Mal added.

"Thing's only got a range of a mile, sir." Zoe said. "Once the wolf was done with him, it probably took off. We've got some tracking to do to find it. Once we're in range, though, the scanner'll make it easier."

Mal nodded. "Still…" he said.

"Sir, you're being crazy." Zoe cut him off.

"I don't think I am." Mal shook his head. "Tell me, you're a prospector, been at it for a while in a territory you know gets wolves from time to time. So you go to sleep in your claim one night, and what?" he gestured at the door, "Leave your gate unlocked so a wolf can get in?"

"Not everyone's full to the brim with common sense the way we are, sir." Zoe drawled.

"But this fellow, McMurdo, he's been workin' claims for years." Mal countered. "You heard Vostok. He has to have known better."

"Coulda been drinkin'" Zoe shot back, gesturing to the side of the tunnel, where a few bottles of whiskey lay sideways on the ground. Mal went over and looked at them.

"Only one open . Half empty. You know many miners who'd be that much of a lightweight?" He asked. "'Sides, this fellow was pals with Vostok, and we both had a few pulls of that swill he brewed. Any man can take a shot of that gutrot I don't think he'd get all forgetful over a half-empty bottle of whiskey."

"Coulda been something other'n alcohol." Zoe answered. She was standing now, arms crossed over her chest. She was highly invested in playing the devil's advocate, here. Mal wondered why. "Plenty of things to take the edge off after a hard day's mining." She finished.

"You see any evidence of that?" he asked. Reluctantly she shook her head. "Besides, biggest thing ain't how he died." Mal said. "It's when."

"How so?"

"Man exchanges words with Vostok, who works one claim over, every day or so. They're within range of each other's radios, so they talk. Man needs someone to talk to, right?" He asked. Zoe nodded. "So he goes radio silent for a full three days, but when Vostok shows up wonderin' what happened, he finds fresh blood on the ground? Still wet? An' I know wolves on this rock get big, but big enough to take down a man of McMurdo's size when he's got his knife right on him, and still be able to drag him off?"

"Loners are even bigger'n pack wolves, captain." Zoe answered. "And now I know you're getting all crazy."

"On account of what?" Mal demanded.

"On account of this is none of our business." Zoe snapped back at him. That snapped Mal out of it. She was right. "We were hired to take down a dangerous, lone wolf, sir. Not to be detectives. You sound like you're playin' at bein' a mystery writer, sir."

Mal deflated. "You're right, Zoe." He said after a pause. "Job comes first."

Zoe glared at him.

"Okay! No need to get all prickly on me. Job comes only. Nothin' else." He said. But he took one more look at the signs of McMurdo's last struggle, laid out on the ground in front of them. "Still, I don't like the idea that there might be more here than what we're seein'." He said. "Could mean surprises, and surprises ain't good in our line of work."

Zoe calmed down, as well. Mal had his own reasons for wanting to know the truth, and now that she heard them they sounded every bit as reasonable as her reasons for letting it sit. Compromise, then. "We'll keep our eyes open, sir." She said. It was her way of acknowledging that Mal's thoughts were valid. "But one way or another we still got a wolf to kill, sir, if we want our pay."

Mal nodded. Didn't really matter what happened here, after all. Father Joe was convinced it was a wolf and wanted it gone. They still had hunting to do.

"Guess we're done here, then." He said. Zoe nodded and the two of them made for the entrance. Zoe, for her part, was relieved. The tracker in her knew Mal had a point, but the soldier, ever the pragmatist, wanted this to be nothing more than the large, hungry wolf it looked to be. She followed Mal out of the flimsy tin doors McMurdo had erected at the entrance to his claim. Mal was already making his way to their skiff so he didn't notice when she paused at the entrance before leaving, looking at the tracks one more time before they rode off.

Zoe's jaw clenched and her heart sped up a few beats. On the ground, right inside the door, there was a single boot-print in the dirt. It had a unique zig-zag pattern.

_oo00oo_

Simon and Jinnah hovered over the patient. The pethidine had finally taken effect and the miner lay supine on the table in a chemically induced stupor. Simon stood behind Jinna, his hands over hers as he guided them to different parts of the patient's arm.

"When you've got an arm like this that's badly healed you can fix it, but you need to re-break the bone" he explained. "Normally this would be done in surgery and with specialized machinery to ensure the break was done perfectly, but unfortunately we don't have the same luxuries that hospitals in the core do, so we're going to have to do this the barbaric way." He said. Jinnah nodded, looking more than a little pale.

"Now, run your hand along here," he instructed. "You can feel that?"

"Yes." Jinnah nodded. Simon could tell she was bracing herself for what they were about to do.

"Tell me about it." He said, mostly to get her mind off of the fact that they were about to break this man's arm again.

"The original fracture was in the upper humerus." She answered. "It set unevenly; there's two distinct ridges on it, one on the side nearest the bicep, one near the tricep."

"Well said." He smiled. "The humerus is the hardest bone in the arm to break. Normally we wouldn't do this at all, but this man is lucky; his arm healed in such a way that we can break it cleanly here and take care of it. It's because of those ridges you pointed out; if we brace one of them against the table properly it should provide a point of force which we can use to make a clean break of the arm."

"Should?" She asked.

"There's a small bit of risk inherent in any medical procedure, Jinnah." He answered. "It's possible that this could go wrong, but with the proper amount of skill and the right actions, we can minimize that risk. I'm going to provide the skill. Everything will be fine."

After a second she nodded. "Alright. Now what I want you to do is place one of your hands here," he guided one hand to the man's shoulder, "and your other one here." This time he guided her other hand to the man's bicep, slightly above the elbow. "Now," he finished, "we're going to do this together."

He shifted the man's arm just slightly so that it was sitting correctly on the table. "Now, look at me." He said. Jinnah turned around to look him in the eye. "This has to be done quickly and forcefully. On my count, now. One… two…. three."

Simon and Jinnah both pushed down with force. Jinnah added considerably less so Simon put more of his weight into it to compensate. The arm broke cleanly with a harsh snapping sound. Jinnah's face went pale and she nearly fell backwards into him.

"I've got to go." She said, then rushed out of the room.

Simon sighed. She'd be a good medic. At least she actually cared about whether or not she hurt her patients, which is more than he could say for himself when he'd first arrived at the academy on Osiris. At that time he'd only cared about excelling. It had taken more than one harsh instructor to convince him that excellence and compassion were two sides of the same coin in the medical profession. He set the man's arm back on the table. He'd have to wait for Jinnah to come back before he could show her how to set it properly. Hopefully she'd be able to handle that better.

There was a click behind him and Simon froze. He'd grown very familiar with that click. Slowly he turned around to see who was pointing the gun at him.

"You let him die."

It was a young man, maybe eighteen years old. Simon couldn't place him at first.

"I don't know what you're talking about." He said, trying to buy time. Then he realized who he was looking at; it was Harmon Smith, the young man who'd been driving the skiff that brought them from Serenity to Portage. It was Harmon Smith, the brother of Tracy Smith, whose body they had sent by courier service back to St. Alban's a little more than a year and a half ago. The boy's face was clouded over with absolute hatred.

_Réncí de shàngdì, qǐng ráole wǒ ba_, he prayed silently.

"Don't play dumb with me, you s_hāqì mádài de gǒu shǐ._" Harmon rasped. "Tracy was there! On your ship!" his voice shifted from a rasp into an outright yell. "He bled out and you let him die!" by now Harmon was screaming in his face. With luck somebody would hear and come investigate. With luck Harmon wouldn't kill him first.

"Harmon," Simon said, trying to diffuse the situation. "I know you're not going to want to hear this, but he bled out too fast."

"You're lying!" Harmon yelled.

"The wounds were fatal!" Simon shot back. If he was going to die he didn't plan to do it like a coward. "There was nothing I could do!"

"You're lying!" Harmon yelled again, as if he could make it the truth through pure force of denial. "Father Hill told me what a miracle doctor you are. Trained on the core, rich boy who learned from the best. Do you honestly want me to believe you couldn't help him?" He demanded.

"I couldn't help him, Harmon. Some shots are fatal no matter who the doctor is." Simon's jaw was set. Harmon's face had become bright red and Simon could see him mustering up the will to pull the trigger.

There was another click. Another gun. This time, though, Simon felt nothing but relief. Book stood in the doorway. "I suggest you let him go," the man said. His voice implied that it wasn't a suggestion at all.

Harmon looked behind himself at the shepherd and let out a small, arrogant laugh. "You're just a _gorram_ Shepherd." He said. "You won't do anything to stop me."

Book strode forward until the gun was an inch from Harmon's face. He looked furious. "Listen to me, you arrogant little child," he snarled. "If I see so much as a twitch on your face that suggests you plan to pull that trigger, your mother is going to have to mourn the death of yet another son." Simon was shocked at the force in his voice. He'd never seen the Shepherd looking this dangerous, or this mad. "Do you want that?" Book demanded.

"He let Tracey die." Harmon said. He looked like he was on the verge of a breakdown, like the lie was all he had left. "He killed him."

"I was there, boy." Book retorted. "There was nothing he or anyone else could do."

Harmon stared defiantly down the barrel of Book's gun for a brief moment before he lowered it and then stalked out the door. Simon collapsed backwards against the table, forgetting that he still had a patient lying there and stumbling rather gracelessly.

There was a brief moment of silence between the two men as they composed themselves.

"Thank you." Simon said, still shaken. This was the second time in the space of ten hours he'd had a gun pointed at his face. The first was last night, when he and Book were both taken in for questioning by Father Joseph's men about Tracey's death.

"I need to tell Joseph about this." Book answered. Evidently he was reluctant to accept the thanks. Simon had trouble understanding why "Are you going to be alright?" Book asked.

Simon nodded. There was another long moment of silence between the two before Book finally turned to leave. "I'm just glad he didn't call your bluff." Simon joked as Book walked towards the door, trying to bring some levity to the situation. He should have known better; Simon was horrible at bringing levity to anything.

Book turned around and looked him straight in the eye, and the magnitude of what the man had done hit Simon full force. The Shepherd's eyes looked shaken and hollow, vulnerable in a way Simon had never seen before. Simon realized he hadn't been bluffing; Book had been ready to put a bullet in Harmon Smith's skull, falling from grace, violating every vow he'd made as a Shepherd, just to save Simon. And that would torture the peaceful shepherd for weeks. Months. Maybe forever.

And then the look was gone as Book buried the anguish and turned away. "I'll send your assistant, Jinnah, back in," he said. "She's outside, bracing herself for your next lesson."

"Thank you." Simon whispered. Not just a polite thank you for offering to send his assistant back, but for everything; for saving his life, for his willingness to kill to save him, for his fall from grace. Simon tried to make him understand with just those two words. Book seemed to pick up on it and nodded slowly.

"We talked, before Harmon came in." Book said, referring to Jinnah. "You're a good teacher, did you know?"

Simon smiled and looked at the floor. "I never thought I would be. But I'm glad to hear she thinks that."

Book started to walk out the door but paused one final time. "I'll make sure Kaylee's safe, too." He said over his shoulder. "That boy won't come near here. And when Father Joseph hears about this he won't come near you again, either."

Simon nodded. The shepherd hovered in the doorway for one final second, looking like the weight of he world had landed on his shoulders and he was too weak to bear it. And then he was gone and Jinnah stood in the doorway, regarding Simon shyly.

"Come back in." Simon told her. "The bone is broken properly. We should be able to set it straight now."

_oo00oo_

"Surveillance team Gamma Five, report in."

Mawson was the type of thin-faced weasel of a man who looked like he'd be more at home in middle management at an office than he would be in a top secret Alliance base. In truth that's all he considered himself. But the Alliance wanted a very specific type of middle management to run projects like he one they had going here, and Commander Abraham Mawson was, if nothing else, suited to his job.

"This is Gamma Five, sir." The soldier's voice came from the other end of the comm. Mawson massaged his temples, fighting back a headache. The destruction of the relay had come at one of the worst possible times. They were nearing completion on phase one of their projects and the destroyed relay would mean delays in passing the results to Alliance Central. Right now he wanted nothing more than a cup of tea to ease the strain of dealing with multiple projects.

"What's the status of the wreckage site?" He asked.

"We've done full sweeps, sir. No signs of foul play." The soldier reported. "Relay's buried good, though. Recommend an XK team for full confirmation that the site is tamper free."

Tamper free. That was the question. It hadn't escaped Mawson's notice that this particular avalanche was an anomaly. These things tended to come and go in waves, increasing during seasons and times when fresh snowfall overburdened the existing snow packs. An avalanche in this month was rare. It was possible that it had been triggered by high winds or minor seismic activity, but Mawson was suspicious anyway. He considered his options for a moment.

"XK is authorized." He told the soldier on the other end. "We'll prepare a team that will be there tomorrow morning. Pitch camp and wait for their arrival."

"Orders received, Commander." The soldier responded.

"Is there anything else, soldier?" Mawson asked. "I have a new shipment which needs processing."

"Nothing, sir." The soldier said. Mawson dismissed him and the comm went silent.

He stretched in his chair briefly and pulled out the report in front of him. New shipment, indeed. Fifty subjects collected from the temperate zone of the planet, all resistant, as specified. He thumbed through the report, looking for any salient characteristics that would make processing the subjects easier. After a moment he found it and stood up, walking out from behind his desk and out the door to the room. There was a soldier standing on the other side of the door.

"Prepare an excavation team for relay Sigma." He said absently to the soldier as he continued reading the dossier. "We need them there by 0600 tomorrow, and I'll expect their report within 24 hours." He paused in his reading for a moment, then said, almost as an afterthought, "Also, give the order to shift base security protocols to orange-seven."

"Sir?" The guard said, puzzled. Orange-seven was a significant hike in the security protocols and he couldn't see what had lead the Commander to make such a call.

"Something's wrong." Mawson explained. "Call it a feeling I get. Oh, and soldier?"

"Yes, sir?"

"In the future remember that you explain yourself to me, not vice versa."

"Yes, sir." The soldier said. Mawson watched him for a moment, trying to gauge whether or not he had been properly chastised, then strode away, satisfied.

He arrived at the processing center a short time later, thumbing through the rest of the dossier. One subject in particular stood out to him and he smiled. Processing this batch should be relatively simple.

He entered the room and greeted his soldiers, then looked at the subjects. Fifty of them, mostly transients, taken from the streets of York and the surrounding neighborhoods. They ranged in age from thirteen to thirty two. All healthy medically, speaking, all resistant to treatment. They'd do well for this round of testing. If he was lucky it would be the final round and they wouldn't have to collect any more. York was the largest city on St. Alban's, with a population of close to five million, and though nobody missed a few transients here or there if they took too many off the street somebody was sure to pick up on it sooner or later.

One of the subjects, a young girl of fifteen, stood out in particular. She'd kept the others calm in transit. He smiled at her. "You, there, come here." He said, and beckoned her over. "Tell me. What's your name?"

"Judith, sir." The girl looked wary. She also looked clean. Too clean to be a simple orphan.

"You've done a wonderful job of keeping your fellow captives in order." He complimented her and noticed with some satisfaction the look of irritation on her face. She'd been trying to keep the peace but not to make things more convenient for the men who had kidnapped her and her brother. "Where were you collected from?" Mawson asked.

Judith was silent for a moment. "East York, sir."

Mawson frowned. East York was not good. East York was a slightly more upscale neighborhood. East York didn't have many orphans.

"Not an orphan, then?" He asked.

"No, sir." She said. Mawson's frown deepened. That meant she would have family looking for her.

"I can see I'm going to have to have words with some of my subordinates." He said, and noticed the brief look of hope on her face. "Well, then," he continued, "nothing can be done about it now. Turn around, please." He requested.

The look of puzzlement on her face was delightful. "I don't…" she started to say as she turned.

"On your knees." He interrupted.

"What?" She asked. She got down on her knees anyways. They always did. Amazing what people were willing to do when the person giving the orders seemed friendly. Mawson unholstered the gun at his side and attached a silencer to the barrel, chambering a round as he did so. Judith heard the telltale click.

"Oh, God." She said as she realized what was about to happen. Her voice went weak and she looked at her brother. "Danny…" she pled.

Mawson fired a single, silent round into the back of her head. It entered at the base of her skull and severed her spinal cord instantly. Her death was quick. He considered it a favor; he aimed more to the side for those who were belligerent with him, and let them bleed out.

"NO!" Her brother yelled from across the room. He broke free from his position in the crowd and ran to her, crouching over her body. He was younger than her, thirteen at most. Mawson wrinkled his nose at the sight. Mawson looked at the two guards standing to either side of him.

"Kill the boy, too. Then send them to the science bay and start preparing them for the first round of tests." He ordered. The boy in question, Danny, hadn't noticed; he was crouched over his sister's body, begging her to wake up. One of the guards Mawson had addressed looked hesitant. Mawson watched him for a second.

"You're new, yes?" he asked the guard. The guard nodded. He looked pale.

"Is there going to be a problem?" Mawson asked.

"N…no, sir." The guard responded.'

"Good. On with it, then." Mawson said, gesturing to the boy. The guard turned and stared dumbly at the teenager mourning his sister.

Mawson watched for another second and scowled. "Soldier. I ordered you to shoot the boy."

"B…but, sir." The soldier protested.

"Shoot the boy, soldier."

The soldier lifted his gun and pointed it weakly at the child, who only now seemed to realize what was about to happen to him. He turned and faced the soldier and looked him in the eye. Mawson cursed. The soldier would never be able to do it, now.

"I…I ca.." the soldier stuttered, but before he finished Mawson strode forward, grabbing the soldier's trigger hand and squeezing. It had the desired effect; the inexperienced soldier pulled the trigger under the pressure Mawson was applying and his rifle barked three times in quick succession. They hit Danny in the lower chest and stomach and he collapsed to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut. He was bleeding profusely but still alive.

"Finish him, soldier. It will be a mercy." Mawson ordered. The soldier swallowed hard and nodded, biting back tears. He shouldered the rifle and sited along the barrel, then fired another round into the boy's head. Sometime tonight, in between his tenth and eleventh shot of whiskey, he might actually convince himself that it was the merciful thing to do.

Mawson didn't particularly care about whether or not it was merciful. It was effective for what he was trying to do here, which was to make the subjects compliant. He turned and addressed the group of stunned captives who'd just watched him execute two teenagers.

"Initiative is not rewarded here." Mawson said. "While you are here you are _subjects_. You have no rights. You have no privileges. You do not earn either punishments or rewards. You are not people. Your sole purpose here is to comply with our experiments. If you do this, and you do this well, then at some point in the future you may be released." He was lying, of course. None of them would leave this base alive. But he couldn't have them knowing that; hope made them compliant. With those few words said, he turned and strode out the door, beckoning two soldiers, including the new recruit, to follow him. When they were safely away from the ears of the captives he turned to address them.

"I want the two of you to wait three days, then pick one of them and execute them in front of the others. Don't make a show of it, or a speech. You're simply to take and kill one of them."

"How do we choose, sir?" the new soldier asked. He was still shaken.

"I don't care." Mawson told them. "Pick one. Flip a coin. In fact, you should be very careful to make sure that there's no discernable reason at all for your choice. It will reinforce what was done here and make sure there are no further problems with them."

The guard swallowed and nodded. Mawson decided he'd have to look into the man's background at some point. The soldiers who came to this base were not supposed to be surprised by the things they did here. If this one was another mistake, an error that slipped through the bureaucratic cracks in the system, then Mawson would have to expend extra effort making sure the man adjusted to the routine. If he couldn't adjust… well, he was under a secrecy agreement. Treason with the penalty of execution if he voiced what he saw here, so Mawson wouldn't need to expend any effort silencing the man.

He gave the new soldier an encouraging smile. He'd dealt with new recruits before and they were usually shaken, though not as bad as this man had been. "I want you to understand, soldier, that the forty-eight subjects inside that room are just that, and only that; _subjects._ They are not people. They do not have rights. They are transients and orphans, scrapings from the underbelly of a society that doesn't want them. Nobody will miss them. And what we are doing here, soldier, is far more important to humanity then their lives. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir." The soldier answered. He seemed to be composing himself. That was good. Mawson turned to leave, but realized there was something he could do, perhaps, to make things easier on the man. He turned back to him. "All responsibility for your actions falls on my shoulders, soldier. Your job is to follow my orders. If you do that and do it well, you are blameless." He said. The soldier nodded, looking doubtful. No matter. In a few days, when he pulled the trigger on the next man, he'd believe it, if for no other reason than that his conscience would leave him no other choice. It would make him compliant, and that's all that mattered to Mawson; compliance, and people who followed orders. They were necessary if he wanted to run a tight ship, and he did.

He smiled as he left the processing room. This was his last pressing duty of the morning and he was free to go get his tea. He would have to send out an order to have Judith and Danny's parents silenced, inconspicuously, of course. A car accident, maybe. And he would have to have words with the soldiers responsible for recruiting subjects from the cities for their experiments. But those things could wait until later. For now he wanted tea, and after that he could get back to work on the numerous other tasks that required his oversight. He was, after all, very suited to his job.

_oo00oo_

Harry had half a click to go when the timer he'd set on his watch beeped, signaling the end of his hour. He leaned against a tree and breathed deeply. Any minute now they would spot the wreckage of his skiff. One radio transmission later and the satellites would switch on, running a full biometric scan of the surrounding area, and Nemo would have to drop the masking protocols he'd implemented. Harry figured he had maybe a half an hour before they tracked him down. He decided to make use of it and turned west, hoping that he could wind up far enough away from Nemo's ship by the time they caught him that he could keep the rendezvous point from coming under surveillance.

"Ghost, do you copy?" It was Nemo again.

"I'm out of time, Dreamer. I'm gonna try to lead them away from you, see if I can't give you some breathing room before they catch me."

"There's been an anomaly, Ghost." Nemo responded.

"…how so?" Harry asked. For a brief moment he allowed himself to feel hope. It was rewarded.

"The Alliance arrived earlier than estimated and has already finished surveillance of the area." Nemo answered. How was that good news? "They were unable to find any trace of your skiff."

Oh.

Relief flooded Harry and he collapsed to the ground, laughing in disbelief. Nevermind that it hurt his chest and some of the sealant broke loose, causing him to bleed again. "Well, there's a good spot of luck when we need it." He said.

"Mission is still viable, Ghost." Nemo said. Harry could hear the smile in his voice. "I get the feeling, though, that luck had little to do with it."

Harry disagreed. His magic had gone dormant well over half a year ago and hadn't woken up at all since then. If it had picked now to wake up and do something, well, that was luck, pure and simple. Nemo had no idea about that, though. All he knew was that strange things had happened around Harry frequently for a few months after they'd first met, and that those strange things often tipped the scales in Harry's favor.

"One of these days you will tell me why all of these… occurrences seem to happen around you." Nemo said in a voice that brooked no argument.

"One of these days, I will." Harry agreed. "Sooner, if it proves to be mission critical. Later if it doesn't. Are you sure there's no chance they're putting on a show to flush us out?"

"None at all, Ghost. I'm monitoring all frequencies from to and from the area, as well as a visual feed through one of their satellites. The skiff is gone. Even the mineral sensors on the satellite aren't picking up any traces of it."

Harry laughed again. A new rush of energy and determination buzzed through his system and he turned again, hiking straight for the rendezvous. When he finally cleared the edges of the forest he stood at the base of a mountain. The slope was gentle at the bottom and there was a set of rocky crags a few hundred feet up.

"I've got visual on the rendezvous, Dreamer. Comms off." He said. He heard a familiar clicking sound and the mild static coming through his earbud died. He began his slow trek up the hill to the rocky outcroppings, his legs burning every step of the way. The strain of his trek was beginning to catch up to him, and by the time he made it to the rocks he could barely move a muscle.

There, in a small, open clearing nestled behind the rocks, was a small ship. Just big enough for a two man crew to fly, with enough room in the back that they could take turns sleeping when their time in the pilot's seat was up. He trudged over to it and the hatch on the side opened, beckoning him in. It was warm. It was cramped. It smelled like sweat. And at the moment it was home and he couldn't fathom wanting anything more.

He stumbled in through the hatch and practically crawled to the cot in the back as it closed, ignoring Nemo, who was sitting in the pilot's seat. He shed his jacket and applied a small coat of sealant to the few cuts which had opened back up, then lay back on the thin mattress.

A rustling sound came from the front of the ship and Harry's left hand shot up, catching the ration bar Nemo had just thrown at him. From his prone position he looked to the pilot's seat as Nemo turned around. The man had dark skin and the kind of gentle face which hid just how much of a predator he truly was. He was smiling.

"Do you know what your greatest sin is, Harry?"

"Hell, Nemo. I can think of a few I'm pretty fond of." He grinned. "Right now, though, I'm gonna go with gluttony." He said, opening the ration bar and jamming it into his face. From the passenger seat Nemo contemplated him, his hands folded in front of him.

"You know, I met another man once who said something like that." Nemo said. "He also happens to be the only man I've ever met who draws trouble the way you do."

"Was he as good at getting out of it as I am?" Harry grinned. He couldn't stop grinning. The ship was small but right now it was like paradise to him.

"Yes, he is." Nemo answered. "Maybe even better."

Harry finished his ration bar and relaxed. He could already feel sleep overtaking him.

"Hey, Nemo?" he said before drifting off.

"Yes?" Nemo asked.

"You ever want to know what your number one is, you ask me, okay?" And with that, he was asleep.

In the pilot's seat Nemo turned back to his monitors and smiled softly. He hadn't lied; the reason he kept Harry around was because he was useful. But he had grown fond of the boy in the year they'd known each other, in the way that a teacher grows fond of his favorite student. Harry bore such a resemblance to Mal Reynolds sometimes, though, that it frightened him. The reluctant warriors. Both of them craved the same freedom and yet, when the chips were down, could be counted on to take up the warrior's mantle and charge bravely into battle. Both fought hard to escape belief in something bigger than the moment, but both believed anyway. Nemo suspected that they even believed in the same thing, but he'd never bothered to inquire. Both of them had gravity, and a tendency to draw exceptional people into orbit around them. Unlike Mal, though, Harry was frighteningly perceptive. Nemo suspected that if anyone could tell him what his greatest sin was, it was him.

_oo00oo_

Finding the wolf had been more difficult than Mal had anticipated. Its tracks had been almost completely obscured by the winds of the valley. But Zoe was, among other things, a brilliant tracker, and could spot signs of the wolf's passage that weren't so easily erased. A scratch on the bark of a birch tree, a broken twig, fallen pine needles on top of the snow; Mal couldn't help but wonder at what the world must look like to Zoe, who saw the hidden stories behind the smallest details.

He felt the bitter cold bite down on him, chewing on his patience more than he'd care to admit. The last time he'd seen the sun had been around noon, high in the sky but withholding it's warmth like a jealous woman. That had been hours ago, before they entered the forest. It was nearing dusk before they managed to follow the wolf's trail to a small valley.

He stood on a hillside looking through the scope of his rifle at the wolf's den below. As they closed in they started finding tracks that the wind didn't have time to erase. A trail of small, nondescript paw prints snaked through the snow, fading by the moment but still present. Mal watched them disappear like small patches of cloud on a windy day, following their last moments until they stopped at a small copse of trees at the very bottom of the valley.

Inside the trees, as white as the ground surrounding him, the wolf shifted back and forth, a lithe, ragged animal warily surveying its territory before settling in. Mal observed its every movement. It walked to and fro for a moment, then looked up, staring directly at him. Mal didn't blink, and neither did the wolf. He felt, for a brief moment, the same feral quality he'd felt when he first eyed down Jayne Cobb. A keen, animal intelligence, the kind those unfamiliar with life on the outside simply couldn't understand, flickered and flamed in the lens of his scope, challenging him.

He was pulled away from the sight by the familiar click of Zoe's rifle as she engaged the bolt. He looked over and saw her kneeling in the snow, braced against a fallen tree, gazing with an equally feral intensity into the scope of her own rifle. "You see it, Zoe?" Mal asked, returning his attention to the wolf, which had gone back to pacing back and forth through the trees, keeping a wary eye for any threat to it's peace.

Zoe stayed perfectly still. "I can, sir."

Mal lowered his rifle. The creatures last moments were its own. "Take the shot."

A single shot echoed through the valley, rolling up the snow, over the ridge, and into the skies beyond.

_oo00oo_

River lay on her side, staring at the walls of her room as she drifted off. She'd been paying close attention to the sound all day, listening as it evolved and took on ever-greater layers of harmony and complexity. The soft soulful, trilling noise danced about her mind like a candle flame. It sounded like... healing. Healing her? She didn't know. But it felt good.

The other sound, the rasping breath, the angry grind of metal against stone, the sound of knives being sharpened, had grown dim in the pulsing melody of peace that had burst into life inside her ears. She pictured the metal and stone sinking into the flame, melting until it was nothing but sound, and the fire sang to her, warm and powerful and drawing her towards sleep.

She smiled and rolled over, covering herself in her blanket. "Phoenix song," she whispered. And then she fell into a deep and untroubled sleep for the first time since she had stepped through the doors of the Alliance academy four years ago.

_oo00oo_

_**Translation Notes**_

_**Bùxìng** –_ Unfortunate_  
><strong>Xié'è de gǒupì<strong> –_ Unholy shit_  
><strong>Zuòbì mǔgǒu!<strong> – _Cheating bitch!_  
><strong>Piànzi<strong> – _Cheater_  
><strong>Gāng mó<strong> – _Just die_  
><strong>Réncí de shàngdì, qǐng ráole wǒ ba<strong> – _Merciful God, please spare me_  
><em>**S_hāqì mádài de gǒu shǐ_**_ – _Murderous sack of shit

_oo00oo_

_**World Notes**_

Pethidine is an opium derivative. Real medication, again, thanks to Wikipedia. Simon's procedure for re-setting a bone was made up completely. Any parallels to real medical procedures are pure coincidence. Please don't try it at home.

The four characters introduced in this chapter – McMurdo, Vostok, Jinnah, and Mawson are all named after research stations in Antarctica.

Most of the fight between Harry and the wolves is based off of the information I could glean most readily from Wikipedia. I'm not sure if they will attack somebody who is standing their ground in the way that Harry did. If you know more about wolves and it turns out that they wouldn't, then we'll just say that the particular breed of wolves inhabiting St. Albans is a bit meaner than the ones we deal with here on good ol' planet Earth.

The town of York is made up, at least as far as it applies to the world of Firefly. To the best of my knowledge nothing like it exists on St. Alban's. For that matter, the entire equatorial zone is made up. All of the information I found on St. Alban's suggests that it is entirely a winter planet, but I decided, based on my meager knowledge of the principles of geography, that it would be more interesting if the equatorial zone, getting more sun, had a reasonable climate and a larger population. York is, as stated in the story, the largest city in the temperate zone.

_oo00oo_

_**Author's Notes**_

I'd like to offer a sincere thanks to all of you who have reviewed so far. I've received twelve of 'em since posting the last chapter, which is three times as many as I got for either of the previous ones. I tip my hat to you all, and hope you found this chapter fun as well.

For those of you who are curious, the title of the chapter is a reference to both Harmon and Mawson. Metaphorically, they're both wolves, and while Mal, Zoe, and Harry kill their fair share of wolves in this chapter, it's the ones that they let live that ultimately drive the arc forward to its conclusion.

I tried writing a small part of this chapter with a co-author. Whenever I write a chapter I script it out first, sort of like a screenplay. Special thanks go to Theantiryan for contributing to the final two scenes of this chapter. We wrote it together, not by passing it back and forth to each other, but by both logging in to GoogleDocs and opening a document that we could both edit simultaneously. The script was posted and we both wrote away, correcting each other and adding alterations to each others' writing even as we created our own. The end result is a piece of writing that is the product of two minds, and it's hard for me to tell now where my writing begins and his ends. I enjoyed it immensely. If any of you are interested in trying something similar once I have the next script please feel free to contact me. Don't expect the process to be 100% smooth, though. As Theantiryan and I found out, argument is part and parcel of the process, even though we managed to keep it mostly civil.

SaintJimmy84


	5. Winter III

_**Disclaimer**__: I do not own Harry Potter. If I did, I would put him to work for me, repairing broken furniture, lifting heavy objects, cooking food, and assassinating my enemies. Also, I don't own Firefly. If I did, I'd… uhh…. Actually, I'm really not certain __what__ I'd do if I owned Firefly. _

_**Co-authors disclaimer**__: If I owned firefly, I'd hire Jayne to lift things, Simon to knit things, Kaylee to twist things, Mal to shoot things, and I'd send Wash to die in battle so I could have Zoe for myself._

_**Credits**__: Thanks go out to Sudentor for his assistance with translating and with the beta work for this chapter. Additionally, large parts of this chapter were co-written with TheAntiRyan, entitling him to credit and to the above disclaimer._

* * *

><p><em><strong>Episode One: The Endless Winter<br>Chapter III: Ravenous Things**_

_oo00oo_

_I come among the peoples like a shadow.__  
><em>_I sit down by each man's side.__  
><em>_None sees me, but they look on one another,__  
><em>_And know that I am there.__  
><em>

_My silence is like the silence of the tide__  
><em>_That buries the playground of children;__  
><em>_Like the deepening of frost in the slow night,__  
><em>_When birds are dead in the morning.__  
><em>

_I unswear words, and undo deeds.__  
><em>_Naked things know me.__  
><em>_I am first and last to be felt of the living.__  
><em>_I am Hunger_

"Hunger" – Robert Laurence Binyon

_oo00oo_

"_I am a leaf on the wind," he said. "Watch how…"_

_With a massive cracking sound, the front viewport of Serenity caved in and lunged for him with fingers of shattered plexiglass and warped metal. He screamed, or at least he tried to. For some reason, his lungs and chest refused to cooperate. Perplexed, he looked down and tried to figure out why._

_His brain couldn't process what he was seeing. Absently he observed that he seemed to have a wooden pole the size of a birch tree growing out of his chest. A sudden wave of fatigue overtook him and he collapsed forward, or would have, but the pole in his chest (why was that important again?) wouldn't even allow him to do that. And so he just hung there, suspended, like a puppet dangling from one final string._

"_WASH!" somebody screamed. "Wash, baby. Baby, no! Wash come on, you gotta move, you gotta…" the voice grew more distant. Whose voice was that?_

_It was Zoe._

_And in that cruel moment the confusion cleared and Hoban Washburne realized that he was about to die. He could see the others dragging Zoe away, her voice growing more and more frantic as they grabbed her arms and wrestled her out of the bridge. He was going to die alone. He was going to…_

_The darkness moved in to claim him._

He woke up with a scream, his heart thundering in his chest.

Wash looked around. The cockpit was empty, and devoid of twelve-foot-long wooden posts sticking out of his chest. For that, he was immensely grateful. His hand drifted absently to his left side, under the armpit. The rough grain of the wooden post had sheared off the skin there like sandpaper, over an area so wide that the full span of his hand couldn't even cover it. It was nothing but a gnarled mess of red, angry scar tissue, even now, a full year later. He'd broken four ribs, as well. He still had trouble breathing.

Zoe had an almost identical scar on her right side. His mind brought back the scene – the crash landing, the brief moment of calm, Zoe's scream and the sound of shattered plating as she tackled him, even as Serenity's viewport caved in under the weight of the Reaver's wooden missile. It tore through the space between the two of them and drove through the pilot's seat, the rough carve of it driving the two of them apart and taking a good deal of skin and blood with it, besides.

Blood. There'd been so much blood. Not just from him, but Zoe. It was only Simon's quick thinking that kept the two of them from bleeding out. He shuddered, and then took a deep breath and tried to calm himself.

_Breathe in. _"I am a leaf on the wind." He lied to himself. Leaves didn't bleed.

_Breathe in._ "I am a leaf on the wind." He lied again. His heart didn't believe him and continued crashing against his ribcage like an animal trying to tear its way free. It was too much.

"_Tā mā de_" he hissed, and shot from his chair. The entire bridge of the ship felt like it was closing in on him and he had to get out. He bolted from his station, sliding down the ladder and striding through the front hallway with purpose, down the stairs, down past the catwalk and into the cargo bay. The air-lock opened easily and then he was outside, feeling the shrill bite of the cold cavern air against his skin. He crumpled to the ground and groaned. His breath was vapor. He fought hard to keep from retching.

He'd neglected to tell Mal about these panic attacks. Or Zoe. He suspected they knew anyway; it's not like he could hide them. God, had he just stepped away from his post? In the back of his mind he could hear the voice of his old drill sergeant from the naval academy. The man was screaming at him. He fought for a moment to calm down, breathing the cold, bitter air deeply until his heart calmed again. He didn't know how long it took before his breathing returned to normal. Too long, though. And then he was back in the ship, sealing the airlock behind him. His shoulders sagged as fatigue overtook him, now that the panic was leaving, and he trekked with lead feet through the cargo bay again, climbing the stairs and following the catwalk to the dinner hall.

He put on a pot of coffee, lay back in one of the chairs and closed his eyes, letting his senses drift to his breathing, and then his heartbeat, and then through the ship. He could hear the soft sound of Jayne's snores coming from the crew quarters; no small feat, considering that Jayne's room was the closest thing the ship had to sound-proof. River was slumbering as well. He'd drawn the early watch, manning the bridge in case they were hailed over the comm. But then again, any alert from the others, he could hear just fine from here, he supposed.

"I am a leaf on the wind." He told himself again, and this time it didn't seem like as much of a lie.

He wiped the cold sweat off of his brow and groaned. He couldn't let this keep happening to himself. As the coffee finished brewing and he poured himself a mug, he wondered just what Mal would do when he realized that his pilot was broken.

_oo00oo_

The old trapper sat on top of the bones of a fallen pine. He stared at the remains of the trap in front of him, his lip curled in a soundless snarl.

"That's the third this _gorram_ week," Filchner spat into the mess in front of him—a jumble of heavy gauge mesh and framing and the frozen entrails of what might have been a fox, at some point. There was barely enough of it left for him to be sure. Blood spackled the base of the birch where the trap lay. A hard shudder worked its way up from the base of his spine; he'd seen plenty of broken traps in his time, working the game trails of New Alaska. None of them broken like this, though.

"Damn wolves. It's gotta be," his partner, Byrd, cursed. Byrd's mood was equally foul at the loss of both a night's stew and a valuable pelt. "Didn't even leave the fur behind."

"Wolves ain't that smart." Filchner said, a deep furrow appearing across his brow as he considered the trap in front of him. Filchner was a slight man, easily swayed by wind and superstition alike. His beard was the thickest thing about him, though as of late it had begun to grow wispy. He knew his traps like the back of his own hand, though, and this trap? He'd made it himself a few years ago, back on one of the rare trips into town where he'd had the occasion to. Wolves couldn't break a trap like this.

"Ain't no other way to explain it, Rue," Byrd said. He was the younger of the two, and less experienced by far. Byrd filled out where Filchner thinned, and seemed to stay stocky in spite of the lack of food this far south. The extra weight reached his face, making him look more than a little childlike under the layers of chicken scratch he tried to pass off as a beard.

"Don't try to sell me _nè yì tuó shǐ_, Byrd," Filchner sneered. "You saw that snare yesterday. Ain't no way a wolf made it that high. Ain't no way." He rose from the fallen pine, shaking off the ache in his shoulders.

"I'm just sayin," Byrd sulked. "It's the only thing what makes any sense."

Filchner sniffed. "Ain't the only thing."

"What, a bear, then?" Byrd asked. Filchner paused at that and scratched absently at his beard. Bears were tall enough. Vicious enough. Most of them stayed further north, where the climate was kinder and food more plentiful, but in this part of St. Alban's, they ranged far during the early months of winter, grabbing what they could before hibernating. It wasn't a bad assumption. Except there were no bear tracks. Filchner shook his head.

"You ain't tellin me you think someone's movin' in on our claims?" Byrd scoffed. "I mean, look what they done to the catch. Ain't no human does that."

The two men looked long at the tangle of bloody pulp and wire at the base of the birch tree. Byrd was right. "No boot tracks, either," Byrd shook his head. "Just wolf tracks. An' not enough snow or wind these past few days to cover up if a man passed this way. How do you explain that?"

Filchner couldn't.

"Go check the snares on the south trail," he told Byrd. The dismissal in his voice was clear.

"Rue…" Byrd started.

"Go check the snares, Abner." He ordered. Byrd looked stricken for a passing second, then ground his teeth together, no doubt biting back more than a few unkind words.

"Sure thing, Rue." He finally managed, and then he stalked off, the sound of his boots crunching against the snow growing slowly fainter, until only the blowing wind remained.

Filchner cussed under his breath. Byrd was right. There were plenty of wolf prints, but no sign of human passing. But Rue Filchner knew his traps, and the cage in front of him had been more than adequately proofed against wolves. So was the snare they'd stumbled across yesterday, hanging a full fourteen feet off the ground. Whatever was getting into their traps, it wasn't a wolf. Filchner would have laid money on it, except all the tracks said otherwise.

More unsettling was this; looking at the wreckage in front of the trap in front of him, Filchner couldn't shake the feeling that it had been opened before it was broken, like whatever creature had done it just wanted to terrify the trapped critter inside. Higher in the birch tree, about eight feet off the ground, there were a few broken branches and some scuffed bark which could have easily been caused by the cage being hurled through the air.

That scared the living shit out of him.

Byrd deserved more credit than the old trapper had been willing to give him. The kid had smartened up since he first moved out here from the equator. Not enough to see what the tracks weren't telling him, but enough that Filchner owed him some sort of apology. The old trapper's fingers twisted absently around a small grey ring on his thumb—a small keepsake from a battle long lost. Once, it had a shine to it. No longer, though; the rough winters had worn it away.

"_Gǒu pì_" he cursed his predicament one last time, still fiddling with the ring around his thumb. Then he set off on his own path around the frozen lake, working his way along the northern bank.

_oo00oo_

_She was immersed in a darkness so thick and unyielding that it clung to her skin like ink. How long she had been walking, she did not know. All that remained of her world now was the sound of the burning melody from her dream, and as the notes pulsed through the oily black like an invisible flame she could feel the heat of each vibration whisper across her body—a thousand feather-light kisses humming across her cheeks, her breasts, her legs. The sound had become closer than a lover. It permeated her. There were moments where, had she not been able to feel the stead rise and fall of her feet as she trekked towards the source of the music, she would have sworn that there was no more River; that only the melody remained._

_She wasn't entirely sure, in fact, that she __would__ remain. At first there had been the dream of the flame, but that had consumed her and now there was only this. And with each step forward, the song inside her grew and she could feel it pressing and swelling in the depth of her until the boundaries of her being grew fragile and strained. She felt like a bubble on the surface of a cascading stream, swirling lazily around in a brief eddy, waiting to be caught by the current. She was afraid that she was going to pop._

_She trekked through the darkness for a thousand miles more before finally reaching the source of the song. And then she did._

_oo00oo_

"Wolves, my ass."

A torn rabbit leg dangled from a snare fifteen feet above him. A wolf on St. Alban's could clear a twelve-foot jump if it had lid ground beneath it. Fifteen, though? On unpacked snow? But again, that's what the tracks told him. He had no way of knowing what to make of it.

This was the fifth snare he'd set along the northern trail of the lake. The other four had been untouched, and the line he carried with him contained a few hares and a fox. Whatever was getting into his lines wasn't taking everything, and for that he was grateful. He rested his hand on the rifle at his side, though, feeling its reassuring presence as he trudge along the snow covered trail. Ten minutes passed, then thirty, then an hour. Shortly before noon he arrived at the far end of the lake, where the north and the south trails met once more.

He was alone. And so he waited, sure that Byrd would be along soon enough. The south trail took longer to check, after all. There were more traps.

A half hour later, Byrd still hadn't shown, and Filchner's patience was wearing thing.

_"Yīkuài rèqì téngténg de gǒu shǐ," _he spat. "Byrd, where in the nine hells are you?!" His voice echoed out over the frozen lake. There was no response. "_Gorram_ backbirth," he muttered. "Damn fool wouldn'a known his way out of his mother's own _bī_ if'n a doctor hadn't been there to show him."

He grabbed his line and pack and began the trek around the southern end of the lake, cursing Byrd for every bit of extra work he'd had to do. He had no idea what kind of trouble the man had managed to work himself into, but as he started to check the lines on the far end of the south trail—lines that Byrd should have already finished—he decided it had better be pretty damn good, or the younger trapper would never hear the end of it. By the time he'd cleared six lines, Byrd still hadn't shown.

"Byrd!" he yelled again. "What the hell is goin' on?!"

Still no response. A gust of wind rolled down from the nearby mountains, kicking up whorls of snow.

"Byrd!" he yelled.

Silence.

For the first time since he'd set off around the south end, Filchner began to worry that something might be wrong. He stopped collecting from the traps he passed, and instead just started checking for signs of his partner.

There were thirty-one traps on the south trail. Filchner knew them all intimately. He used a spare coil of rope from his pack to run the line of game he'd caught up a tree, so that the wolves wouldn't get to it in his absence. He'd cleared out the final six lines on the southern trail already. Now, though, as he set out towards the fork in the trail where they'd parted ways, it was just a matter of glancing at them to see if Byrd had been there.

The twenty-second trap on the line was a small metal cage, concealed under some brush near a stand of birch. It had been left untouched and un-sprung. The nineteenth was a simple wire snare. It had caught a fox, which dangled, limply, fifteen feet above the ground.

The fourteenth was a spring-loaded jaw that looked to have caught, of all things, a mountain cat. It hadn't been kind to the creature, either; its death struggle against the teeth of the trap looked to have lasted a while, if the thrashed snow and brush indicated anything at all. There was still no sign of Byrd, either.

Filchner knew, now, that something had to be wrong. There was no way that Byrd wouldn't have made it this far. And with the weather, and Byrd's experience with the trail, there was no way he could have gotten lost, either. Filchner didn't like the options that left remaining. He quickened his pace.

The tenth trap in the line was another snare. Untouched. So were the ninth and the eighth. No sign of his partner.

The seventh was a cage he'd built himself. There was a hare inside, still alive. No sign of Byrd.

The fifth was a pit snare. Empty. No Byrd. Whatever the hell had happened to him, had happened shortly after they had split ways.

It was on his way to the third trap in the line that he finally find his partner's trail. It ended in the middle of a small, snow-filled clearing, abruptly. Far too abruptly. "Byrd?" he called. He was having trouble making sense of what he was seeing.

The clearing wasn't large; maybe fifty feet across, all told, and covered shin deep in snow. The trap was another cage, hidden in a thick stand of birch on the far side. Byrds tracks emerged from the forest on that side and then wound around the edge of the clearing towards the birch stand. And then they broke pattern and lurched towards the center of the clearing, leaving behind long, deep furrows in the snow. He'd been running from something. And then…

Nothing. His tracks simply stopped—two empty prints in the snow with not a thing to fill them.

"Abner?" his voice cracked. The clearing was completely silent, and he was keenly aware for the first time that he wasn't going to get an answer. He drew the bolt on his rifle and steeled himself against the silence, taking a cautious step forward to investigate his partner's tracks.

"Ab…" something rustled in the bushes to his side and a deafening *CRACK* broke the silence of the clearing. It took Filchner a moment to realize that just emptied his rifle at a fox, and that the sudden shaking of the earth around him was, in fact, the hammering of his own heart. The fox tore away through the brush, unharmed.

"_Shénshèng de diàntáng,"_ he hissed, and reached into the pack at his waist, grabbing a new bullet for his rifle. It dropped into the snow, his fingers trembling too much to get a steady hold on it. He took a deep breath and then stooped to grab it, fishing it from the snow and then loading it into his rifle. Then he took a few cautious steps into the clearing, towards the tracks Byrd had left behind.

They were knee deep, with no sign of a struggle at all. After all of that running, halfway across the clearing, it was if he'd just stood there and… what? Then what?

Then he spotted the first flecks of red in the snow.

"_Jīdū de shēntǐ,"_ his face went pale and his heart started pounding again. He took a moment to master his fear and was about to examine them further when, impossibly, he heard the telltale crunch of something stepping in the snow behind him.

_oo00oo_

_She welcomed the dissolution. With it came a rush of sensation beyond description. Beyond hearing, or sight, or taste, or touch—a medley of new senses, a rush of knowing. She knew Serenity, ensconced in its cave in the lonely mountainside; a steel lightning bug humming with energy, swaddled in a cocoon of stone and snow. She knew the snowy wastes and the secrets buried beneath billions of tons of earth, sealed in by aeons of permafrost. She knew the vast network of silent, patient caverns carved by ages into the crust of the planet, untouched by human feet. She knew the bright glare of Zhu Que shining against the vast expanse of snowy wasteland that covered the southern hemisphere._

_She knew other things, too. And these things surprised her. She knew that a thousand miles south of Portage, along the edges of an island-sized continent hidden entirely by ice, when the southern borealis lit the evening sky, spirits of wind and light danced across the snows. She knew that the caves below Serenity eventually led into an aquifer that had been around almost as long as the planet itself, and that in that aquifer, _something_ slept, something immense, and when it shifted in its slumber the motion was such that vibrations of it could be picked up on sensor arrays across the planet, if only faintly.  
><em>

_If there was any sense she kept which could be considered even remotely human, it was her sense of feeling. The planet thrummed with life and she could feel the vibrations and the heat of it rising from her core and suffusing the entirety of her being. She could feel the pulse of life across the surface, so recent, so young, but already accepted as part of the planet. The entire planet vibrated in a soundless symphony.  
><em>

_Absently, she felt a single, dissonant note arising from the mountains nearby, and in her curiosity, her consciousness rushed to understand it, rolling down the mountainside and through forests dense with birch and pine, across the surface of a frozen lake, until she was in front of it. It was wind and the lonely howling of wolves, starlight and the chill of the mountain snows. Something about it seemed deeply familiar. She reached out her hand to it._

_And then it noticed her. _

_The dissonant note magnified a thousand fold, rising into a horrible, keening screech that she knew all too well, and before she was even aware of it moving, it had lunged, ripping into her, infecting her, tearing right into the core of her being._

_oo00oo_

"**AAIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"**

Wash was still sitting in the mess hall, nursing a cup of cold coffee, when River's scream tore through the halls of _Serenity_. He was on his feet in an instant, running out of the mess and into the hall connecting the crew quarters. He almost opened the hatch to her bunk but, God help him, thought better of it. Even on the best of days, River was a murder machine waiting to b e activated; he knew that far, far too well after the crew's experiences on Mr. Universe's moon. He'd almost forgotten that in his haste to get to her.

But her screams continued, the shrill edge tapering off into a deep, tortured wail. Whatever was going through that head of hers right now was…

"_Gorram_ hell, what in the _lǎoshǔ chūmò de xiàshuǐdào dìyù_ is happening to her?!" the hatch to Jayne's bunk opened and he lumbered out of it like a bear emerging from its hibernation.

"I have no idea." Wash said, his lips set in a grim line.

"What in the hell do we do?" Jayne asked. "We can't just _leave_ her in there."

Wash stared at Jayne blankly. What the hell? Less than a year ago, that's _exactly_ what Jayne would have done. And he would have jammed the hatch with a pipe, as well, to make sure she couldn't get out. Now he was searching for solutions. Wash racked his brain for one and found it.

"Wait here, Jayne. Bar the hatch and make sure she stays in there," he said, and then he was off, running down the hall and through the mess, and into the bowels of the ship. It took him less than a minute to tear through the cargo bay and into Simon's office, where he frantically began searching the shelves.

"Come on, come on" he muttered, looking over the labels one after the other. "Come on." Peroxide, scopolamine, rubbing alcohol, topical anesthetic. "Oh, _fuck_, please don't tell me he took all of it with him!"

He had. "Gods _damn_ it! _Tā mā de gǒu yùn_." Simon must have taken the sedatives with him. Wash rooted around in the cabinet for anything else that could be of use. Even from here, he could hear the terrible sound of River screaming for the pain to stop. Finally, something caught his eye.

"Ether. Oh, thank God. He didn't take it all." Wash grabbed the bottle of ether and a cloth and raced through the ship again, back to the crew quarters. River was _still_ screaming. He'd never heard anything this bad from her before. Jayne had grabbed the hatch and was holding it in place, but it didn't seem to be needed; she hadn't made any effort to escape her room.

"What've you got, Wash?" he asked.

"Ether," he said, removing the cap from the bottle and damping the rag with it. He held it at arms length but the films were noxious and made him light headed.

"I'll go first, then," Jayne said. "I hold her, you knock her out."

Wash nodded. Left unsaid was the worry that River would fight back. If that were the case, Wash worried that neither of them would be able to handle it.

"On three?" Jayne asked. Wash nodded again.

"Okay. One, two, three." Jayne turned the wheel on the hatch and lifted the door open, opting to jump straight down the hatch instead of using the ladder. Wash followed, stepping quickly down the rungs.

_oo00oo_

Rue Filchner twisted around with a speed that shocked even him, bringing his rifle to bear and pulling the trigger. Another thunderous *CRACK!* echoed throughout the clearing and the forest.

Nothing was there. Filchner was on the verge of terror now, reaching for another bullet in the pouch at his belt to reload his rifle. It was an uphill battle just to keep his hands steady. "_Zǔzhòu shàngtiān__,_" he cussed. "What in the hell is happening?" he muttered, loading and chambering his rifle again. "What in the _gorram _hell is _happening_ here?"

His only answer was another moment of complete silence in the clearing. He looked all around him again, just to make sure. He was alone. There was nothing. Not even a footprint to indicate that there was anything else in the clearing besides him. He looked again at Byrd's last footprints, at the flecks of red around it. How had he not _seen_ the blood? He was keenly aware now of the fact that he would probably never see his friend again.

As he stared at the flecks of blood, something else caught his eye. The sunlight reflecting off of the snow was blinding, but if he squinted his eyes enough, the ground around the footprints and the blood flecks wasn't pure white. It had an odd hue to it. He was having trouble placing it. A gentle breeze started to blow and the powdered snow around the empty boot print started to lift, carried away by the wind.

It was pink. He could see it now. No, not pink. Red.

_oo00oo_

River was curled in fetal position on her bunk. Her moan was like nothing he'd ever heard before. Nothing human. Wash couldn't begin to fathom the pain she was in. She didn't seem to notice that they were there, too caught up in the source of her torment. She started muttering something to herself—a mantra to ward off the pain, perhaps. Wash couldn't make out what she was saying.

Jayne moved softly to the edge of her bed and gave Wash a glance, then reached to hold her down so that Wash could use the ether to grant her some respite from the pain.

Instead, River exploded in a flurry of movement and flailing limbs. Her legs wrapped around Jayne's neck and she brought them down with force, cracking his head against the frame of the bed. She hopped into crouching position on the mattress and saw Wash across the room, looking at her, with a rag soaked in ether in his hand. And then she screamed at him.

This was nothing like her earlier screams. This was fury and defiance and _hate_ and pain all rolled into one, and before he had a chance to process what was happening she had launched herself off of the bed at him, barreling into him with all the force her ninety pound slip of a frame could muster. It was a surprisingly large amount of force, and she used it to jam her elbow right into her solar plexus, driving him into the wall and knocking every bit of air in his lungs right out of him. The rag hit the floor, and Wash would have followed, except that she had her hand around his neck, choking him.

Her eyes were wild, her hair a mess of crazy tangles, and her shoulders heaved with every violent breath she drew. Wash could feel himself starting to black out, the fumes from the ether rag and the lack of oxygen slowly overpowering him. She leaned in closer and he got a good glimpse of what pure insanity must have looked like. It was enough to terrify him.

"It _**wants**__._" She hissed. He had no idea what she meant but he was able to recognize it as the mantra she had been chanting earlier. River's hand tightened around his neck.

And then suddenly there was a meaty cracking sound and River lurched forward, her head smashing into his nose. The pressure around his neck slackened and then disappeared completely as River slumped against him, completely unconscious. Wash fought to get his breath back against the tightness in his throat and the incredible empty ache in his solar plexus. Blood ran freely from his nose; he thought it might have been broken. He looked up through the red haze to see Jayne standing where River had been, massaging his knuckles and cussing under his breath at the pain in his hand.

"What in the _gorram _hell just happened here?" Jayne asked.

_oo00oo_

The wind in the clearing slowly began to pick up. It tugged against Rue Filchner's beard and coat and cap, and kicked up vast whorls of powder, carrying them into the forest. And as the snow was carried away, he started to see the full picture of what had happened in the clearing.

There was blood. Blood everywhere, scattered across the snow in large patches of red so wide and far reaching that Filchner had no explanation for it. It surrounded Byrd's last tracks, stretching for fifteen feet in any direction. A thin layer of powder, which must have been brought in by the wind, had concealed the blood, but was being carried back out again as the gusts picked up. Filchner's terror increased with the mounting gale; his face blanched and all of the strength left his joints. It was all he could do to keep from collapsing to his knees.

The blood had seemed off to him, at first, and only now did he finally piece together what was wrong with it. It was spread evenly across the snow, a thin layer coloring the top of it for meters around. If it had been liquid, if it had been any normal attack, the heat of the gouts of blood leaving his body would have melted deep trenches in the snow, and would have spread out in lines and spatters around Byrd as he died. There were no spatters, though, and no trenches. Whatever killed Byrd had left behind nothing but a spray of blood so fine that it rested on top of the snow evenly.

"Wolves, my _ass._" He cursed again. It was the only thing he could think to say. And then he ran like hell for home, traps forgotten, game forgotten. All he wanted now was the safety of his cabin in the woods—the roar of the fire and the log walls and the sturdy iron bar locking the door.

He ran like hell.

_oo00oo_

_**Translation Notes**_

_**Tā mā de**_ – Translates roughly to "fuck this," except without the sexual connotations inherent in the English phrase.  
><em><strong>Nè yì tuó shǐ<strong>_ – Roughly, "that pile of shit"  
><em><strong>Gǒu pì<strong>_ – Strictly translated, means "dog fart." However, in usage and tone, it's similar to the English phrase "horseshit."  
><em><strong>Yīkuài rèqì téngténg de gǒu shǐ<strong> _– Roughly, "that piece of steaming shit." Obtained using Google Translate.  
><em><strong>Bī<strong>_ – You should have no trouble translating this on your own, given the context.  
><em><strong>Shénshèng de diàntáng<strong>_ – Roughly, "Sacred temple." Obtained using Google Translate  
><em><strong>Jīdū de shēntǐ<strong> _– Roughly, "Body of Christ." Obtained using Google Translate.  
><em><strong>Lǎoshǔ chūmò de xiàshuǐdào dìyù<strong>_ – Roughly, "rat-infested sewers of hell." Obtained using Google Translate.  
><em><strong>Tā mā de gǒu yùn<strong>_ – Approximately, "curse my rotten luck."  
><em><strong>Zǔzhòu shàngtiān<strong>_ – Roughly, "curse the heavens above." Obtained from Google Translate.

_oo00oo_

_**World Notes**_

I know next to nothing about trapping, and even less about trapping during the winter. Filchner and Byrd's actions, then, are based on my very faulty understanding of what trapping entails, and are likely in error.

Filchner and Byrd's names, like the rest of the characters introduced in this arc, are taken from Antarctic research stations.

My research on wolves indicates that a grown wolf can jump about twelve feet in the air. This is based off of a quick Google search in which I typed "how high can a wolf jump?" into the search field.

_oo00oo_

_**Author's Notes**_

Well, it's been close to a year and a half since I updated this. My apologies go out to you. The truth is that, for the first year, I had no idea where to go with this story, and plenty of other things (such as moving to California and attending grad school) to distract me. Towards the end of 2012 I finally understood what was missing; I'd taken the situation on St. Alban's and wound it tightly like a spring, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what kind of event should trigger it so that it would all uncoil. I had originally decided that I wanted to avoid introducing anything magical into the story until at least the second arc, but then around November, as it was getting colder, I found an easy way to resolve my problem.

Magic is chaos. And now that I'd set up the characters and their motivations over the past few chapters, all that I needed to do was introduce chaos. I looked over the previous chapters and realized that by taking a new direction I could tie in numerous references and minor threads that I'd originally intended to resolve in different ways (like the death of McMurdo), and that I could do so in a more interesting and graceful way. And so I introduced chaos, in the form of something large and horrible and predatory and, above all, _magical_. And with that, I inadvertently switched the genre of this particular arc to survival-horror.

The next several months were spent trying to write what happens next. It culminated in a long chapter script. The good news? This chapter is only the first part of that script, and only a third of it, at that. Expect another large update in the near future.

SaintJimmy84

_oo00oo_

_**Author's Question**_

Anybody want to guess what the creature is?


End file.
